Nerve Endings Firing Away

WordPress is a powerful and flexible blogging platform with its functionality greatly extended by numerous plugins and web services available out there. But at times, we have an unique request that doesn’t have a documented solution available as yet.

First the problem; as you know DesiPundit offers links in seven languages but admittedly the majority of the content is in English which is primarily the main focus of the site anyway. We use the ‘Category Visibility’ plugin to remove the Indic content from the front page and instead offer it on their individual language pages [it has a feeds option too but it removes the category feed completely if you uncheck the box]. This works great for the website visitor since they browse through the front page for English content and the respective Indic pages for languages they understand and wish to read. Thus, we aren’t forcing content that everyone doesn’t understand on to everyone. Although I would like to give Indic languages their due, I understand that forcing content down the readers throats just puts them off.

However, the main site feed still had all languages. One consistent request in our recent Reader Survey was to separate the Indic content from the main feed to avoid cluttering their feed reader with content they would never read. Since I am one of those blog readers who rely solely on the feeds for content and repeatedly emphasize the importance of feed readers, this was a top priority for me. We used to use Feedburner to manage our feeds but since doing that renders our category feeds invalid, we disabled it at the cost of keeping a count of our feed subscribers. But the capabilities of Feedburner are too powerful to ignore. So to wrap things up, I wanted to use Feedburner (and the Feedburner Replacement Plugin), exclude Indic posts from the main feed, and offer separate feeds for each of the Indic languages.

Given the current scenario and advice from some WP gurus, I was told to choose between the two – Feedburner or separate feeds; and the category exclusion problem remained unresolved as well. Until of course, Abhijit Nagouda from iface thoughts modified the Feedburner Replacement Plugin to offer category or author feeds while using Feedburner [download the modified plugin here; change the extension to .php]. Ah-ha! So that solved the first problem of availing of category feeds while using Feedburner. We could reactivate our Feedburner redirection [notice the jump in the image]. But the problem of excluding Indic languages remained.

Now, it helps that we define Indic posts by slotting them to only one category i.e. Hindi posts use the category ‘Hindi’. This was done in part for the exclusion from the front page. So after picking Abhijit’s brain for doing the same for feeds and a little Googling later, the perfect solution was found.

Go to your Feedburner account. Select the appropriate feed you want to modify [in case of multiple feeds] and click on Edit Feed Details… Enter the following in your ‘Original Feed’ address bar:

http://www.domainname.com/feed?cat=-21,-22

where 21 & 22 are the categories you want to exclude from your feed and of course, replace domainname with your domain name. You can add additional categories by specifying the Category ID with the ‘-’ prefix separated by a comma. This will exclude the above-mentioned categories from your main feed while maintaining the individual category feeds. Simple, right? As a novice, I have seen that most tech fixes are.

Unfortunately, the only downside is that you cannot have a count of those individual category feed subscribers since the Feedburner Replacement Plugin allows you to specify only one [and the comments] Feedburner feed in your Options. Let me know if you know of a workaround.

Now the DesiPundit Main Feed excludes the Indic languages and the Indic language links are available via separate feeds at:

http://www.desipundit.com/category/<insert_Indic_language_here>/feed

Currently, we offer Hindi, Tamil, Bangla, Kannada, Marathi, & Telugu languages. I hope these individual feeds have enough subscribers to make the job of our Indic contibutors worth their time.

This fix is useful for bloggers who want to exclude posts from categories like Asides, Short Notes, etc. where they post just quick links. Or even for bloggers who want to exclude their personal posts from feeds while continuing to display them on your blog. For e.g., if you wish to focus on a certain subject like technology, business, etc. on your blog while continuing to write an occassional personal post, it might be wise to separate out your feeds to avoid confusing your readers. Offer a separate ‘personal’ feed alongside your main feed to those wishing to keep a tab on your personal life.