Online Tech

First, think to yourself: If I were going to create a new site (possibly a blog) for that “other” material, what would be that site’s purpose? What might be its mission statement? How might you organize the site content?

Next, think of a (short) site title and description. You probably want to make the title somewhat general, since you haven’t actually created that future site. In the next step, you’ll see why we’re doing this now.

In your current WordPress site, create a new category. Give it the title and description you envisioned above. Create subcategories and sub-sub categories as appropriate for your current “other” content, and your vision of what the “other” site will become.

In WordPress, you can tell WordPress to not display empty categories, so don’t worry about making extra categories. Therefore, if you want to remind yourself of how you intend to organize the “other” site, you can create extra sub-categories now, and let them remain empty. Or, create what you need now… you can always add more sub-categories later.

You might already have your “other” content organized this way. You might not need to create any new categories at all. So much the better!

Add your content to the new categories, according to your new plan and vision for the “other” material. Remember that you can assign individual blog posts to more than one category. So, instead of moving your posts from one category to another, you can keep the post in both categories. You’ll have to decide what approach is right for you!

Next, we’ll “burn” (create) an additional Feedburner feed, consisting of that “other” category that you just created. That feed will pick up anything in the category and anything in any of its subcategories.

For the interim, you’re done! You have your “other” material off to the side, and a feed available to people who are interested in that “other” content rather than the main content of your site. For example, you might have come to my site to read my technotes, and don’t care in the least about the site’s main purpose. And now I have the feed just for you!

However, our interim solution still has a major problem. In my case, if I keep writing technotes (the “other” material), it pushes my primary material right off the front page of my site! People drop by looking for that main material, and it’s not there to be found. Instead, they see all this spewing of technical blathering. Do you think that potential reader will bother to come back for more? Probably not!

The complete solution, then, is to create a separate site for your “other” material. You already have it planned and organized, at least in concept… therefore that creation will actually become easy!

Here’s the nice part. Once you’ve created that site, just update your Feedburner account to point to the feed url of that new site. All of your readers get to keep the same feed. Nobody needs to update their bookmarks, because their feed address hasn’t changed.

Do you see why you went through that exercise of visualizing what that “other” site might look like some day? When you switch the “other” feed over to the new site, you can keep the same name and description. The site’s look and feel will be different, but the content will remain familiar to your loyal readers.

Thanks to planning ahead with Feedburner, you’re good to go!