There may be all sorts of reasons why you might want to find the feed from different elements of a WordPress site – whether it’s yours or someone else’s.
- You might want to publish a feed on your site.
- You might want to follow a certain feed in a feed reader.
- You might want to submit a feed to a directory.
- You might need a feed to make a certain plugin work right.
- You might want to monitor a certain site for the appearance of a term. (VERY interesting.)
- Etc.
There are a number of ways to find your feeds, but in general, you can just make add /feed/ to the end of a URL, and that should do it for you. So, for example, to find the feed to a specific category, navigate to that category, and then in the address bar, add “/feed/” to the end of it, and then navigate to that URL.
There are a few that might be a little trickier than that, and we’ll go over them. But we’ll start with the easier ones.
Note: Although I will say “add /feed/” to the end of the URL, make sure you DON’T have a double slash // in the URL. Your URL may already end with a slash.
Correct: www.example.com/feed/
WRONG: www.example.com//feed/ (See the double slash? That makes it wrong.)
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Entire Site
Find the feed for your entire site. Go to the homepage, then add /feed/ to the end of the URL.
www.example.com/feed/
Individual Categories
Find the feed for a specific category. Navigate to your category, then add /feed/ to the end of the URL.
www.example.com/category/category-name/feed/
Individual Tags
Find the feed for single tags. Navigate to the individual tag page (click on the tag link), then add /feed/ to the end of the URL.
www.example.com/tag/tag-name/feed/
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Individual Authors
Find the feed for specific authors. Navigate to the individual author’s page (click on their name) , then add /feed/ to the end of the URL.
http://example.com/author/author-name/feed/
All Comments
Find the feed for all the comments on the site. Type in “/comments/feed/” at the end of the homepage URL.
http://example.com/comments/feed/
Comments on a Single Post
To get a feed of the comments on one individual posts, navigate to the post, then add /feed/ to the end of the URL.
http://example.com/uncategorized/my-post-name/feed/
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Feed for Search Terms
This one is a little trickier but also a little more interesting. Imagine monitoring a site just for the terms you wanted. It could save a lot of time and energy sifting through things you don’t want.
You can do that by grabbing the feed for search terms. Instead of the usual /feed/, with this one you’ll need to add &feed=rss2 to the end of a search URL.
If a site doesn’t have a search box on it, this post will help you still find the search URL.
Or you can just add the following to the end of the main domain: ?s=searchterm&feed=rss2. You would replace “searchterm” with our actual term.
http://example.com/?s=searchterm&feed=rss2
Specific Example:
http://example.com/?s=plugins&feed=rss2
If you are searching for more than one word, add a plus sign (+) between the words: video+plugins.
http://example.com/?s=video+plugins&feed=rss2
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Photo: RSS symbol from BigStock
Is there any way to get a SINGLE feed for multiple distinct tags?
Hi Shawn – Not that I’m aware of. But maybe you could run multiple feeds through something like Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/) and then get one combined feed.
Thanks, but I don’t see pipes working out. I really need something for one of my sites that can be adjusted for the visitor by simple checkboxes across a large number of tags (300+). They select the tags they want to follow and it builds a feed URL for them with those tags in it…preferably in a human-readable form so they can hand-edit the URL later on if they decide not to follow one of the tags at that point or add another in. So far the closest I’ve seen was a plugin that hasn’t been updated in ~4 years and only worked for categories. :(
Sounds as if that might be a job for some custom coding. If that other plugin pretty much does what you want (only for categories), you may be able to get someone to create one for tags if you aren’t a coder. You could at least put up a post on some of the freelance sites (sites like elance, freelancer, vworker, etc.). Tell them in the job ad to look at the other plugin so they’ll know what they’re dealing with (many still won’t, however). Also, if you’ve never put up a job at those sites before, be sure to make it clear in the first line of the ad or even the title what maximum amount you’re willing to spend will be (e.g. $75). If not, you’ll get a lot of ridiculous bids (and probably still will).
I just did another cursory search for any plugins that might do this today (it’s been a while since I searched for a solution), and it turns out it’s unnecessary. WP can handle multiple tags in a URL now, so you can use example.com/tag/tag1+tag2/ to get the recent content with those tags. I tried adding ‘feed/’ to it to get results for all of them, and it worked like a charm. Now I just need to code up an interface to build those URLs. :)
Shawn – I tried the tag1+tag2 trick when you asked the first time. It didn’t work for me. I just tried again, and I can’t get it to work. Not sure why.
In any case, if it works for you, then it works for you. So that’s good.