twoLER

Wordpress is known to many as a blogging tool, and increasingly as a CMS tool (http://www.number10.gov.uk/, http://www.stephenfry.com/) but less so as a source of RSS feeds.

Some will have seen the orange RSS logo on Wordpress sites and may even know how to obtain the feed URL to use in an RSS reader to read the most recent blog posts.

In fact Wordpress can be used as a very powerful, but simple RSS generation tool by simple modification of any URL that is displaying a page.

For example, clicking on a post’s category will bring up a page in inverse chronicalogical order of all posts in that category. On this blog there is a category for posts about ’software’ and the page is http://www.twoler.net.php5-8.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/wp/category/software/.

Simply by adding /feed to this URL the same information is rendered as an RSS feed…

http://www.twoler.net.php5-8.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/wp/category/software/feed

The same can be done with tags, and dates (if the calendar widget is enabled).

Finally this RSS generation feature can be used with search results. However the URL modification is slightly different.

If the search URL is http://www.twoler.net.php5-8.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/wp/?s=twoler&search=Search (here searching for posts containing ‘twoler’) then the RSS feed version of the search results can be obtained by adding &feed=rss2 e.g.

http://www.twoler.net.php5-8.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/wp/?s=twoler&search=Search&feed=rss2

See how easy it is to generate your own RSS feeds!