Random Thoughs

An awesome campaign for our rights as a photographers. Definitely worth printing off and keeping it in your wallet.

Maximize your RSS potential in minutes with these 5 Wordpress plugins

I guess you could say I’ve been on a RSS kick lately (See 1, 2), please forgive me

But take a few minutes to install these 5 plugins and you’ll reap all the impressive benefits described below. To install from your Wordpress Dashboard go to Plugins » Add new then search by each plugin’s name and click “Install.”

1. FD Feedburner Plugin

Automatically redirects your Wordpress feeds to your Feedburner feeds so you can take advantage of all Feedburner has to offer.

Install and activate the plugin from within your Wordpress Dashboard then go to Plugins » Feedburner Configuration and change Redirect my feeds here: to your Feedburner feed URL.

More about FD Feedburner Plugin »

2. Subscriber Inbound Traffic Tracker

Segments your inbound RSS traffic in Google Analytics so you can effectively measure subscriber engagement.

Install and activate this plugin from within your Wordpress Dashboard and you’re done.

More about Subscriber Inbound Traffic Tracker »

3. WP Pubsubhubbub

If you’re asking WTF is Pubsubhubbub you’re not alone. Without getting technical, Pubsubhubbub notifies your subscribers immediately when you update your feed, an important step towards a real-time Web.

Install and activate this plugin from within your Wordpress Dashboard and you’re done.

More about WP Pubsubhubbub »

4. RSS Footer

Add a call to action (or whatever message you’d like) to the bottom of your RSS feed items.

Install and activate the plugin from within your Wordpress Dashboard then go to Settings » RSS Footer and change Content to put in the footer among other interesting options.

More about RSS Footer »

5. MediaRSS

Tags your RSS items with the first image in each RSS item, making your RSS items stand out in dull text-only lists (I hope I explained that well).

Install and activate this plugin from within your Wordpress Dashboard and you’re done.

Learn more about MediaRSS »

Download all 5 at once

If you’re the manual install type, I’ve made it easy for you. Download all 5 of them together as a .zip file (288 KB). Note that the zipped plugins are the latest versions as of 8/10/09.

Great article on Wordpress and RSS. Definitely worth looking at if you use Wordpress as your blogging/site backend.