How To Get An RSS Feed

This question was asked in a comment the other day. I wasn't sure of the context of the question and whether the commenter was asking how to get an rss feed from another site or how to add a feed to his own site. So here's a quickie on how to add a feed to Wordpress.

How to add a feed to Wordpress

Install Wordpress. Ok, done.

Seriously, that's it. This functionality is already in Wordpress but there are some ways to enhance it. I like Feedburner so I use their service to manage my feeds. Their stats are nice and since the Pro version is now free I'm enjoying it even more. To get Feedburner feeds on your site all you have to do is go to feedburner.com and register an account then "burn a feed" from your current Wordpress feed url.

Your wordpress feed url will be something like: http://www.realitywired.com/feed

Once you've done that, you can add any number of widgets to publicize your feed and allow your readers to subscribe to your feed.

I also use a plugin titled: Feedburner Feedsmith that redirects all other Wordpress rss links to your Feedburner feed. This is handy because it allows you to detect all the different ways people are subscribing to your feed.

Lorelle has a huge list of additional Wordpress plugins designed to enhance and/or manipulate your feed.

Something to consider. Some versions of Wordpress create summary posts in your feeds and if you happen to use the <!-- more --> tag you'll also get summary posts. There is some debate over whether that's better than publishing a full rss feed. That decision is up to the blog owner but a nifty plugin that will force Wordpress to generate a full rss feed can be found here.