How To: Serve Better RSS Feeds To Your Subscribers

Remkus de Vries — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 14:31:41 +0000

Most of your focus on optimizing your WordPress sites is probably on the look and feel of your design and the layout of specific things. Getting that content to display as perfectly as possible. Given that fact it’s a shame we spend as close to none time on optimizing our RSS Feed output. Sure, we hook our feeds up to Feedburner, but most don’t even select the ‘Optimize Feed’ option. Which is strange considering the ratio of people that view your content via RSS versus the actual site.

RSS is supposed to deliver your content as clean as possible, but there are however a few things you can do to optimize the output of your RSS. Here a few plugins that can help you out:

Align RSS Images

Align RSS Images is a simple plugin that scans your RSS feed and ensures that every image has the correct alignment and margin settings. This is useful if you want the images to appear correctly aligned not just on your site, but also in your RSS feed. Download Align RSS Images.

RSS Syndication Options

A plugin to let the administrator modify the RSS sy:updateperiod and sy:updatefrequency parameters in their RSS feed (see http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/). These parameters tell RSS aggregators how frequently they can expect changes to your blog, and should in theory affect crawl rates. Download RSS Syndication Options.

Ozh’ Better Feed

Your feed, on steroids : add a custom footer to RSS items with, for example, a copyright notice, a “Read More (400 words)” links, an “Add to del.icio.us” link, a list of related entries, or anything really (even custom PHP functions). Compatible with Feedburner or similar services. Download Ozh’ Better Feed.

Feed Delay

I think the title pretty much says it all but Feed Delay lets you stop a feed from immediately being published. Plus, you can also disable individual posts from appearing in feeds. Download Feed Delay.

Smart Youtube

What’s a YouTube plugin doing in this list you may ask? This plugin allows you to embed video’s in your feed. As explained on the plugin site: Smart Youtube is a WordPress Youtube Plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos/playlists in your post, comments and in RSS feed.

The main purpose of the plugin is to correctly embed youtube videos into your blog post. The video will be shown in full in your RSS feed as well. Download Smart YouTube.

Extra Resources:

If you’d like to even optimize your feeds more there a dozens of hacks you can have a look at.

This article first appeared on BloggingPro: Optimizing Your WordPress RSS Feeds

How To: Serve Better RSS Feeds To Your Subscribers is a post from: ForSite Media

WordPress Frameworks, Have You Taken a Closer Look Yet?

Remkus de Vries — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 14:23:53 +0000

I’ve been working a lot with WordPress Theme Frameworks lately, most notably Genesis, Thematic and Hybrid, when developing themes. Well, child themes really. There are many reasons why working with child themes is a good way to start developing, but there are also some drawbacks. For me the good weighs out the bad in general, but there are situations where the old straight forward theme development method is just plain faster.

The Good

Building with child themes has a lot of powerful advantages. My favorite are:

Development Speed: Having an already working theme as a parent theme, a theme that already has been looked at from a lot of different angels as to what it should be able to do, and already some basic styling in place makes it a lot easier to quickly make some changes via the child theme style sheet.

Lots of options: Most Theme Frameworks I know have a lot of options built in. I’m not talking about having a lot of buttons and checkboxes added necessarily, but more-so a robust framework with lots of nifty PHP functions and CSS specificity options to configure.
Great communities behind the frameworks Any of the three Theme Frameworks I mentioned earlier make working with their specific Parent Theme so great because there’s is a great community behind it, not afraid to share inventive solutions and best practices.
Future Proof Working with a Parent Theme that is in constant state of development also makes it very easy to stay up to date and incorporate all the latest WordPress goodies. For example the stuff that WordPress 3.0 brings to the table.

The Bad

Like I said before, there are some disadvantages on using a Theme Frameworks such as:

Bloat: When you’re only creating a small, pretty straight forward site, a lot of the theme functions added by the Parent Theme’s library could be considered bloat en thus not creating a lean and mean theme, which I know you all care about.
Forced Direction When creating a child theme you sort of get dictated (and I use that term very loosely) to make heavy use of your functions.php and wrapping your head around filters and hooks can be daunting if diving into PHP isn’t your thing. It may seem redundant to duplicate and and all theme files into your child theme if that’s what you need to do.
Learning Curve There is a bit of a learning curve when working with child theme for the first time. Your basic level of PHP and CSS won’t do, you need to step up and start learning.

Why Use Them Anyway?

For me personally, I’m all about options. I love working with a WordPress Theme Framework that allows me to have a very high level of control over how specific I want to be in what I want my theme to output. I don’t mind the learning, in fact I love learning, and when you know your way around the forums you’ll be able to either find what you were looking for or get a working answer of your fellow developers. Plus, having a Parent Theme that is continuously updated is big plus for me.

Have you ever worked with or considered working with child themes when developing on a theme? And if so, do you favor either Genesis, Thematic or Hybrid over the other (or any other WordPress Theme Framework for that matter)?

WordPress Frameworks, Have You Taken a Closer Look Yet? is a post from: ForSite Media

ForSite Media » WordPress Themes