WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 25. Helping Others Connect to Your Site

In the preceding lesson I showed you how to bring in content from other sites; now it's time to look at ways WordPress can help others make use of your content. Whether it's through a link to your site, publishing an RSS (really simple syndication) feed of your site, or subscribing to your site through their RSS reader, having people connect to your site is an important part of your promotional plans and maintaining interaction with others on the Web.

RSS Feeds of Your Content

WordPress makes good on the "really simple" in really simple syndication (RSS) feeds because they aren't so simple. First of all, there are many syndication formats, of which RSS is only one. Add to that the fact there are several versions of RSS, let alone the question of how to output your content in each format, and you get a sense of how complex the world of web feeds can be. Thankfully, WordPress takes care of all of it for you, generating four separate feeds for a post's content: RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0, Atom and RDF/RSS 1.0.

Although WordPress automatically generates these different feeds, themes typically include only one or two (RSS2 is the most common). If you want help customizing your theme to include more feeds, go to http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds.

WordPress also makes it easy for your visitors to get RSS feeds for very specific content on your site. If you want them to subscribe to all posts for a particular category, just create a link like ...