Do the following:
- Register on my site (if you haven’t done so already).
- Log in on my site (if you haven’t done so already).
- Create your feed of my blog by choosing which categories of my blog you are interested in having in your own custom feed, and which categories you would rather not see at all.
- Subscribe to your own custom feed.
This took me a decent amount of work, but I believe it should work now. For those of you that like some of my stuff, but not the others – now you can subscribe to my blog, but without the politics – or without the religion – or without the fiction series. Or you can subscribe to just the fiction series and nothing else. My data. Your feed.
“We do like you’d do it when we do it like we do it at ” one of Andrew’s feeds (apologies to Burger King for ripping off their jingle).
In case you want to know where I’m going with this, the “subscribe to a feed of comments on all posts for which you have commented on” (which got some decent notoriety) has not exactly been catching on – I think it is a little too conceptually complicated for some people. Same with per-category RSS feeds and a whole bunch of things that I have developed and practically no one has adopted.
So I’m going to phase out those features. Instead, there will be custom feeds (right now it just supports category selection, but I intend to do “add this comment feed to my custom feed for this blog” in the future as well).
Why will people want to use the custom feeds instead of the regular feeds? Simple: I will start putting advertising in my regular feeds.
Let me know what you think.
Credit goes to Read/Write Web, which had the following to say in a recent post for motivating me to finish this idea which I’ve had for a long time:
What if you, the user, could aggregate feeds from people but only view the topics you want, or automatically filter content according to your tastes? This is something developers are beginning to explore now and it’s basically all about giving control of data/content back to the user.
If there’s enough interest in this feature, I’ll tidy it up and release it as a WordPress plugin.
Like I said: My data, your feed.