Multiple Feedburner.com syndication feeds in WordPress, Part A
For most sites, a single syndication (RSS) feed makes the most sense. WordPress makes syndication literally a snap, and Feedburner adds tremendous value. In fact, Feedburner makes it even easier! Of course you already know this, or you wouldn’t be reading this article.
For some sites, it makes more sense to have multiple syndication feeds. It’s not difficult to set up multiple feeds. The problem, for me, was that I couldn’t find any instructions for doing so. So… here’s how I did it. Hopefully this will save someone else a few hours!
The Plan
Here are the steps I took in setting up OnSurvivor.com. Part B will explain each step in detail:
- Understand your site’s purpose. Understand your purpose in creating the site, and understand your site’s purpose. For example, your site’s purpose might be to help people express their creativity by making blogging easier for them, whereas your purpose might be to achieve fame, respect, and cash flow. This article is not about designing your site. It’s about organizing your syndication feeds, but to organize them, you must first understand your purpose!
- Lay out your syndication strategy. What is it that justifies setting up multiple feeds? What is the distinctive characteristic that delineates one from another? What disaster would befall you if you consolidated everything into a single feed?
- Organize your content to match your syndication strategy. With WordPress, any category can become a syndication feed. However, to the best of my knowledge, only a category (or the site as a whole) can become a feed. You must therefore organize your site content (your blog entries) so that your posts feed the right feeds.
- Work around a WordPress limitation. In the current (version 2.0.2) WordPress release, WordPress refuses to display your categories the way you so carefully organized them. I figured out that the fix is to use a parameter in your theme template, that the WordPress documentation says you shouldn’t use!
- Prepare your areas for editing as you register each feed. Set up the following areas, so that you can fill them in as you register each feed:
- Set up a subscription page. Because you have several feeds, a simple
“click here to subscribe to this syndication feed” link won’t be too useful. Therefore, set up a blank page, and fill it in as you register each feed. - Set up a stats button area in the dashboard area of your WordPress admin login. Feedburner provides a graphic that shows how many people are currently subscribed to that syndication feed. When you first register the feed, you’ll have 0 subscribers. Since nobody wants to subscribe to an unwanted feed, keep that number to yourself inside your admin area. Create the space for it now, and fill it in as you register each feed.
- Make a place for your feed validation links. You’ll want an easy way to verify that your feed still works - trust me on this.
- Copy your auto discovery tags off to the side. You’ll be adding several lines for each feed, and I found this easier to do (meaning fewer screwups) in a text file off to the side.
- Populate your content. Wordpress doesn’t show a category unless it and its parent category contains at least one blog entry. Your comments feed won’t show any comments unless you have comments.
- Register your main feed. You’ll be adding most of those extra Feedburner features to this first feed, so it will take the longest. Update the above files for this registered feed.
- Register your second feed. This one requires fewer steps, and will go much quicker.
- Add your feeds to your news aggregator. I added mine to My Google, and sure enough, they worked! The reason for this step is to make sure they do work, before you go any further.
- Check the feed validator. Assuming all is well, add the validation link for each feed, as suggested above.
- Register your remaining feeds one by one, updating the above files as you go.
- Promote your feeds, and update your ping list. As you go around registering your feeds, take note of each aggregator’s ping instructions, and update your update-ping list accordingly.
- Take a last look around before you go. Make sure your files did in fact get updated the way you think they did. Make sure you clicked Save in all the windows. If you updated your admin area dashboard, leave yourself a reminder to re-insert that change after each WordPress software update. If you changed theme files, make sure the changes are in all themes (if you use more than one theme).
If you’re setting up your site from scratch, you don’t have any “old” feeds. Therefore, there’s nobody out there who has your “old” feed urls bookmarked. And, therefore, you don’t need to worry about .htaccess changes, url rewriting, or anything like that.
On the other hand, if you do have old feed urls out there, you will need to figure out a way to keep those old feed users happy. I don’t cover that issue in this article, because I’m lucky enough to be setting things up from scratch.
Don’t mess with a category once it becomes a syndicated feed. You’ll be sorry. Trust me on this too.
Whew… that’s the short version. And in fact, that’s all there is to it! If the above instructions were sufficient, you can stop here. I have nothing more for you.
For the rest of us, Part B begins explaining each of the above steps in detail.
Part B… coming soon! With pictures! I hope… 
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