An hour ago, Mike mentioned wanting to link to a post on a FaceBook profile he’s about to create. The context of his question was such that it had nothing to do with where I took it. Mike wanted to know if anyone would be annoyed because the Basement is looking a little shabby at the moment.
But I ran with the question and began wondering if he could establish an RSS feed of the Basement that would auto-post to his FaceBook thingie when he made a post here on the basement with a specific tag. (I have no idea if FaceBook can do this, so whatever.)
The default RSS links over there on the right are to provide Feeds for all posts or all comments. And that’s crap when we have so many people posting on a wide variety of topics. Let’s remember, Geekery isn’t subject to just rolling dice and slurping on your retainer. You can geek out on anything. (My girlfriend is obsessed with Fonts, for example.)
So I started poking the site settings, checking to see if there was anything that would give you easily accessible links to use in the creation of subject-specific RSS Feeds. No dice.
Knowing a little bit about how WordPress uses a non-permalink set up like what we’re sporting at the moment, I started typing random crap into the URL string for the site and all I was getting were page errors and redirects. Lame. By this point I had blown about 20 minutes on idle curiosity and was beginning to get annoyed because I couldn’t figure this out on my own. Damn WordPress for not being as intuitive as I expected it to be!
After a moment grinding my teeth I started reading through the WordPress help site and saw other people with the same question. Some of them had solved the problem by editing the Theme their sites were using, but since we haven’t settled on a Theme over here in the Basement, that was a non-starter for me. Some people installed a plugin that sort of did what they wanted. I was about to go down that route, and if I had been the one running this site I would have done it in a heart beat. But I’m a guest here, and installing random plugins without asking is rude. So I kept reading.
I bumped into the answer when I followed this link from the WP Help site.
Buried in that post is this:
When using default (non-permalink) URLs, the post-specific comment feeds are available via the following format:
http://domain.tld/?feed=rss2&p=123..where “
p=” references the post ID
I read that twice before I put two and two together.
Our default RSS Feed URL is:
https://comingoutofthebasement.com/?feed=rss2
To view posts with the Zombie tag, the URL is:
https://comingoutofthebasement.com/?tag=zombies
So I tried applying what that post I found mentioned to my problem:
https://comingoutofthebasement.com/?feed=rss2&tag=zombies
And lo and behold, it worked!
It took me an hour when I should be working on real work stuff, but I figured out how to customize RSS feeds for the Basement. I was geeking hard on this, for no better reason than to satisfy my curiosity/annoyance.
So. To get the Feed to work for a specific tag or catagory, click on the link for what you want to be RSSified and in the URL, insert feed=rss2& after the ?.
(I also wasted another 20 minutes writing this post when I should be working.)
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