Create heading specific RSS feeds in WordPress

RSS feed is a great possibility for attracting loyal readers to your blog. WordPress has very good RSS functionality out-of-the-box, but to capture even more readers, you could experiment with adding heading specific RSS feeds for your blog.

In this post you’ll learn how to implement heading specific RSS feeds to your WordPress based blog

Why Heading specific RSS feeds

From my view there are two reasons why heading specific RSS feeds are relevant:

1. If your blog contains information about a broad range of topics, a general RSS feed might be uninteresting for users interested in a very specific topic. A heading specific RSS Feed increases the chance that very focused users signs up to one of your feeds.
2. By offering more options, the probability that the user will sign up to one of your feeds increases

How to build the feeds

The good news is that it’s extremely easy to build heading specific filters in WordPress.

The url of a heading has the following syntax in WordPress:

http://tips4php.net/category/css/

To create a heading specific RSS feed, simply add “feed” to the url:

http://tips4php.net/category/css/feed/

If you want to incorporate the heading specific feeds in your WordPress templates, you can use the following code to dynamically take the heading of a post and create a link to the heading specific feed(s) for this post:

<?php
foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) {
$c=$category->cat_name;
echo ("<a href=\"/category/$c/feed\">Subscribe to $c RSS feed</a><br/>");
}
?>

Conclusion

Youc an be up and running with hading specific RSS feeds in 10 minutes, since WordPress already has the required components among the standard functions.

You can both link to heading specific feeds from individual posts and from category overview pages.