Online Tech

This technote shows you how to add another RSS (syndication) feed to your WordPress site. We begin by reorganizing your categories to take advantage of the new feed. We then set up the new feed in such a way that this feed’s material can be moved to an entirely new site later on.

We follow the same steps explained in Part A, Add another syndication feed to your site, part A. Please read that article first, so you understand why we’re doing what we’re doing!

Our basic problem, you will recall, is that we have a bunch of “other” material that has nothing to do with our site’s main purpose. This “other” content is a good thing, to be sure, but during those times when you’re posting more “other” content than “real” content, your “real” content completely disappears from your site’s main page!

In my case, the site OnSurvivor.com is about the Survivor reality TV show. However, as I convert the site over to using WordPress, I’m writing lots of technical notes to make it easier on the next person, and to help me remember what I did. The unfortunate result is that I have, at the moment, pushed the Survivor content off the front page, in favor of the tech stuff.

Let’s follow the steps explained in Part A to solve the problem. Specifically, we need to separate the technical notes from the Survivor notes.

See Figure 1. This graphic shows my list of categories before making any changes. We want to move the categories Blog Tools, Wordpress change log, Feedburner notes, and Plugins off to the side.

Figure 1. Site categories before any changes made

I gave some thought as to the common theme, and the areas in which I am likely to continue writing “other” material. I decided on a general title of Online Tech - tools, tips, tricks, techniques, and tutorials relating to online software. We’ll use that general concept for reorganizing the categories.

In your Wordpress admin area, go to Manage -> Categories -> (add new). See Figure 2. In Figure 2 we are adding the Online Tech as a new category, with no parent category. Fill in the Name, choose the category parent, type in the description, and click Add Category. (These illustrations use the Tiger Admin theme by Steve Smith at www.OrderedList.com.)

Figure 2. Add Online Tech category

Now we use the Manage -> Categories -> Edit button to change each category to become a sub-category of Online Tech. Figure 3 shows the Edit button for the Blog Tools category. (The formatting looks a bit ugly because I narrowed the browser window to fit here in the blog column.)

Figure 3. Preparing to edit Blog Tools category

See Figure 4. For the category Blog Tools, we change the category parent to our new category Online Tech, and click Edit category.

Figure 4. Change parent category of Blog Tools

Note that your Blog Tools category has now disappeared from your list of categories! See Figure 5. This is because I have WordPress set to only display categories with posts. Since the parent category has no posts, the sub-category is not displayed, even though it does have posts.

Figure 5. Blog Tools category disappears

We continue the reorganizing by moving some posts into the Online Tech category, and changing the other categories to also be sub-categories of Online Tech. Our sidebar now looks like Figure 6.

Figure 6. Reorganized categories

In Part C, we “burn” the feed, and update all of our site files to take advantage of the new syndication feed.

Other blogs discussing: tech note, tech notes, technote, tech notes, syndication, rss syndication, rss, feedburner, multiple feeds, news feed, feeds, site design, blog design, blogging tips, best practices, business blogging, search engines, search engine optimization, seo, darren rowse, problogger, problogger.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 12:32 am and is filed under Online Tech, Feedburner notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.