You write about multiple categories on your blog and want to exclude posts of a particular category from appearing in the blog feed – which is syndicated with Feedburner. This is because you don’t want your blog readers to know about the posts which does not match with your niche or topics.

Adopting this idea may have couple of advantages. First, the user can Subscribe to a particular category of your blog, in which they have interest. Second, you can restrict the “unwanted” posts from appearing in site’s main feed.

Hacks for WordPress Category Feeds

Here are some tips and tricks about WordPress Categories and RSS feeds syndicated with Feedburner.

Q: How can I prevent specific posts from showing up in the RSS Feed of my blog?

A: Install the Feed pauser WordPress plugin and whenever you want a post to be absent in the RSS, choose “Hide in Feed” from the post writing panel. This plugin can also be used to pause the availability of your feed for a certain amount of time set by you. (e.g 30 minutes).

Q: How can I create Category Specific Feeds in WordPress?

A: You need not create category specific feeds because WordPress have it out of the box. Just include /feed after the category URL and you have the RSS feed of a particular category.(see example)

Q: How can I create Tag Specific Feeds in WordPress ?

A: WordPress tags behave just the same as categories. Just include /feed after the tag URL (see example)

Q: Can I Syndicate Category and Tag specific feeds with Feedburner?

A: Yes, of course. The method is exactly the same as you did while burning the main feed of your blog. You can even provide email newsletters for specific categories of your blog and track subscribers.

Q: My blog is xyz.com and the feed address is http://feedburner.com/xyz. After 1 year, I created a new category as “Personal” and want to exclude posts of this category from the main feed address.

A: First, login to WordPress and find the category ID which you want to exclude from the Site’s main feed.

Assuming the category ID to be 6, the Feed URL which will contain all the posts of your blog except posts from the “personal” category is

http://www.xyz.com/feed/?cat=-6

Sign in to Feedburner and select your site’s main feed. Click “Edit feed details” and replace the URL with the above

Important: Do not change the feed address. Keep it all the same.

Q: How can I exclude multiple categories from the Main site feed which is syndicated with Feedburner?

A: Follow the above process and use the following URL

http://www.xyz.com/feed?cat=-6&cat=-7

In the above URL, 6 and 7 are the category ID’s which you want to exclude from the main site feed. To exclude even more categories, use &cat=-ID after the above URL.

Q: How to Syndicate and provide a separate RSS feed for the category excluded from the main site feed?

A: Login to Feedburner, enter the feed URL of the category in the text box ”Burn a feed” and follow the wizard.

Unfortunately, Feedburner does not allows merging multiple feeds together but you can use Yahoo Pipes to merge multiple feeds. Want more customizations? Don’t miss this interesting Feedburner guide by Digital Inspiration.