A few things about feeds, and our site:

First, all wordpress sites, including ours, automatically generate an RSS feed for the home page, all categories, pages, posts, comments, and even Buddypress activity stream by user, group and entire site. Lots of feeds! Now, to access those feeds, and what to do with them once you do, are based on the browser you have, any addons, etc.

So, some browsers recognize the feed automatically, and even if they don’t, and I have a link to the feed of that page, the result of the generated feed is the same. In other words, and for example:

In Safari on a Mac, if it knows there is a feed, an RSS link appears at the right of the url bar, which even presents you with many separate feed options that it has found, including the main site feed, comments, bp activity, etc. If you simply place /feed at the end of the page you’re on, you are also brought to the feed of that page in Safari.

In Firefox this is also true—it also then gives you options for how you would like to read those feeds—as they are displayed, or in the application / site you choose. And firefox also has thousands of addons available, dozens I’m sure for rss needs.

In Chrome, you get nothing but an unreadable page, unfortunately, unless google feedburner is set up for your site, over-riding generally other native responses to the feed.

All that said, what I am looking to do is add a feed link that pops up with options for you to choose how you would like to grab that feed, in case the easier options above are not available to you. Actually, I found a good one. I just have to take the time to add a little code to all the page and post templates so that it is displayed. Also, I’m not sure if I can make this as cool as the built in Safari feeds finder.

fyi, I use different browsers for different reasons. Safari wants to help you, and makes some things easier, firefox is great for developers and many other plugin-needs reasons, chrome is fast and memory low, and relatively dev powerful.

Another possibility for the future is that I think an RSS link somewhere in the menu bar which is a link to a page that actually lists all the general feeds for the site—like home page and post categories, and even some explanation like I just gave you here, but quick and dirty, would be a nice option on top of the share button.

Well there it all is.

RSS feeds are very useful. I have also noticed that there is a twitter account by the name of OccupyKCNews (@KCOccupyPress) that has apparently been set up to use these RSS feeds to auto tweet information about updates to the various pages on the website. E.g. If Rico posted on the media page it is translated into the RSS feed and the twitter account will auto-tweet something like “Rico posted in Media: ‘Hey RSS feeds are cool’ (link).” I am assuming they are using something like this site to accomplish this.

I have talked with others in Facilitation about perhaps using this functionality to create separate twitter accounts for each WG that would auto-tweet activity from that WGs stream. This would be useful for notifying people when updates are posted. Yes it would duplicate what the email subscription feature added to the pages (which is awesome) does but some may prefer to have it go to their twitter stream rather than clutter their inbox (maybe we can poll people to see how many use twitter to find out how useful it would be).

The question is do these RSS feeds exist for the forums as well? It would be awesome to be able to set it up so that people could follow these twitter accounts and not only get info on updates to WG pages but on new discussions posted in the forums as well.