The WordPress platform provides a number of feed subscription mechanisms for the blog readers. It exposes RSS, RDF and Atom feed formats – for both blog posts and comments.
For most practical purposes, it is good enough if your readers are able to find your default feed URL for posts that is permalinked like http://www.YourBlogDomain.com/feed. (This default URL, in most cases, is redirected to the FeedBurner mainly to get and highlight feed statistics). However, the WordPress platform also exposes the category feeds which is only available in default domain feed format (and not in FeedBurner).
Category Feeds
The category feeds are very handy because sometimes some of your readers want to subscribe to certain categories (e.g. blogging tips) of your blog posts while avoiding general rants & updates.
The category feeds can be accessed via standard URLs such as the one below whereby the phrase in bold indicate the category to subscribe to.
http://www.dollarshower.com/category/blogging-tips-tricks/feed
(Note: It is not easy to have a FeedBurner URL for categories, unless you use .htaccess redirects)
Category Specific Feed plugins
The following plugins can help you offer category specific feeds to your readers and do a lot more as well.
Over to you
Do you have the habit of subscribing to only specific category feeds on certain heavy volume blogs? Do you think that it makes sense to go light on your feed reading and/or to reduce spam?
Happy Blogging!
This is a great idea I think for some sites, but only sites that have tons of posts, maybe multiple authors, and very different categories. I, for one, don’t want my feed split up into categories, I prefer the “one feedburner feed” format.
You are right.. If the content is less frequently updated and there’re not too many focus areas then one doesn’t really need category feeds
I don’t have and never thought of having category feed.
Nice post. WIll check category based feed on my blog and see how it shows up.
Yep, some of your major categories may be syndicated separately
This is a great option for subscribers, especially of blogs like mine… I would wait for a while till the count increases to a considerable value and then I can recommend category based subscription to the users.
Am I right in assuming Feedburner won’t consider this in its count?
Yes Raju. It’s very nice to be choosy when it comes to subscribing. Especially when people are interested in only a part of what we write.
I guess, feedburner may not count this though. If getting count of category subscription is the aim, you may have to have a different feedburner URL for the same.