RSS feeds etc under Meta heading – Classic template

This was the gist of the entry under the other RSS topic referred to above:

“There is also the issue for me that although my site can “have a RSS feed attached” to it (by IE7), updates to the site don’t generate notifications to its feed reader. Is that an intelligible comment? Apologies for vocabulary, syntax and conceptual mistatements. What do I need to do to get my site recognised properly? It IS recognised (in IE7 anyway) but that doesn’t generate notifications of changes ie edits, new postings, changes to titles, or anything else.”

Does anyone have a clue how to fix this? Moshu suggested in another thread “deleting the word ‘feed'” from sidebar.php. There are two occurences of the word ‘feed’ that I can find there in the following two ‘lines’ of code:

<li><a>" title="<?php _e('Syndicate this site using RSS'); ?>"><?php _e('RSS'); ?></a></li>
<li><a>" title="<?php _e('The latest comments to all posts in RSS'); ?>"><?php _e('Comments RSS'); ?></a></li>
Do I literally just delete both these words? Do I leave the colon after and the quotation mark before? I worry about breaking things I mess with that I don’t really understand.

Bugger, the code didn’t convert after I hit submit! I’ve posted it on the pastebin i bugger, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’m not sure I’m meant to post in the pastebin anyway here’s the reference to the code:

https://wordpress.pastebin.ca/210499

delete feed: (yep, including the colon) in both places.

Thanks, well I did that: deleted both instances of:-

feed:

in the sidebar.php file.

The result is that things do now happen when I click on the links in the sidebar! Yippee! ??

On hover, the RSS link still shows a question mark (only in IE7 not in IE6 !), but it does now generate a prompt page in IE7 (not checking FF until I have the beta v.2.0 installed). The RSS Comments link doesn’t show this question mark on hover but similarly generates the feed prompt page. Both allow feeds to be subscribed to. (However the radio button still just lists RSS and Atom options.)

HOWEVER . . . what I need is to get the feed to note ALL changes on the site: the edits to posts and pages, as well as noting entirely new Posts and Pages. It does the latter but not the former. Can anything be done to get edits to “trigger” feeds too? Please say yes!

Well, feeds don’t “trigger” per se. When someone requests the feed, it shovels out x number of posts to them. (you configure x at options -> reading, syndication options)

Editing: If one of those posts has been edited, some feed readers will update the reader. Some won’t. Fun with new standards… not every reader treats edits the same…

Pages: By default, WP won’t include a Page’s contents in a feed as that’s considered “static”. There may be plugins for that, I’ve never been interested enough there to look.

Keep in mind that you can also offer category based feeds too. For instance, try clicking on one of your categories and adding “/feed” to the end of the URL.

Thanks.

1. So, a “Feed Reader” request “Feeds” from a URL. The URL (AKA me) decides what Feeds are on offer (?), and the user of the Feed Reader picks the ones they want. Is that it?

2. I (well actually the truly wondrous tekkies at Acenet!) am doing a reinstall and renaming at the moment so I don’t want to edit anything more until that’s sorted. But I understand you as saying that it’s IE7 that won’t Request Feeds (?) thjat are comprised only of edits from my Feed offerings?? Is that right? Maybe FF does.

3. I think IE7 does request the new Page part of the Feeds. I’m sure I wrote a test Page last night and it was requested/found/downloaded by the IE7 reader.

4. BUT you’re saying the WP Feeds include edits, it’s just that some readers don’t ask for them? (this is just the inverse of 2 I guess)

5. If I go to https://www.ilfilosofo.com/ (for instance) the RSS radio button dropdown list includes two options: basic and comments. On mine, although the sidebar shows both: RSS, and: Comments RSS, in the dropdown the options are RSS 2.0 and Atom. Why’s that? But as you say, it seems I can add a feed not only to categories, but to any page on my site . . . can this be true???

Thanks for being my guide on this journey, I really appreciate your advice (and company!) very much.

1) Close, yes. Your blog always hands out the most recent “x” number of posts, based on the configuration at Options -> Reading. It’s up to the feed reader to figure out what it already knew about and what it didn’t — and, optionally, alert the the user to edits/changes in existing posts.

2) See 1. I’ve not really paid attention enough to notice if IE7 -or- FF handle flagging edited posts in feeds.

3) To the best of my knowledge, WP does not include Pages in feeds (reasons given earlier in this thread).

4) They get all the feeds you provide. Some just don’t notice the edits.

5) First issue: This is a new wrinkle that we hadn’t touched on yet. There are multiple ways for your feeds to be “discovered”. The obvious one is your feed buttons on the sidebar. However, modern browsers and feed readers may also look for hints in the <head> tags of your blog.
For instance, in my theme’s header.php, I’ve added the following code:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="<?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />

When the page is rendered, that looks like:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="<?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />

and tells the feed reader that I’m offering three RSS formats. This is what drives that selection you see when clicking the feed icon in the URL bar of your browser.

The category feeds are something that you’d likely offer as links in your side bar (in fact, wp_list_cats can do that automagically). Works nice if your blog covers a variety of topics and some of your readers only care about one of them.

Hope this all helps in some way!