One of the prime reasons Wordpress is amazingly popular is not just because of its sheer simplicity for end-users, but also because it is open to extreme hackery. Be it getting your hands dirty in code, in its visual appearence, or both—thanks to its underlying support for plugins, PHP and themes—WordPress allures the idle mind to hack something. As a system, it is immensely satisfying for those who tweak it to bring unmatched customization and extreme geekery. The best part is that most geeks share it with us all.

The most important—and mostly taken for granted—aspect of this system is that its founders and contributers got their basics right from ground-up before building on new features. I have written something about this before, but let us take another example: the feeds.

If you use Wordpress yourself or if you subscribe to a Wordpress powered weblog, you know how to subscribe to a whole set of blog posts. It would be something like this:

http://somesite.com/feed

What if you were interested in only one particular category of posts? Simple. Just change the URL to your taste. Say for example, I have a category called musings. Here’s how you pull-in only those posts marked “musings” in your feed reader:

http://somesite.com/category/musings/feed

Note: You may have to note down individual blog settings, like for example in this blog, I use a custom permalink structure that includes “archives” in the path. Call it a purist dig, if you like, but I prefer a top-down structure. So, for posts in feed categorized as “musings” in this blog, you’ll point this URL in your feed reader:

http://ckunte.com/archives/category/musings/feed

The best way to do this for any website, powered by WordPress, is to first click on a category. You’ll see the full path of the category[1] in the address bar.

http://somesite.com/category/musings

Now, just suffix that above URL with /feed like this:

http://somesite.com/category/musings/feed

Go on try it. You can have RSS or Atom feed for each of your categories, if you like.

[1] On a related topic, you might want to read Carthik’s excellent post, Tags are not Categories.

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