How I set up a feed based on Wordpress tags using Feedburner

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This post will help any Feedburner users who are trying to set up a separate feed based on your Wordpress Tags or Categories.

I spent a while puzzling over this recently when I was asked to provide a feed just for my travel articles about Europe. I made sure that I’d tagged the appropriate articles with a Europe Tag and then tried to set up a feed but ran into difficulties.

If you use the feed function built into Wordpress this is pretty straightforward. If my normal feed for my blog were http://heatheronhertravels.com/feed I would use the Feed address http://heatheronhertravels.com/tag/Europe/feed to feed all my posts tagged with Europe. If I was using the categories I would use the Feed address http://heatheronhertravels.com/categories/Europe/feed to feed all my posts with the category of Europe.

However, if you are using Feedburner to manage your feeds and have installed the FeedSmith Feedburner Plug-in to do so, then every time you try to click on the feeds above, the feed would be redirected to your generic Feedburner feed for the whole Blog.

To get round this I found out that you have to edit some of the code in the FeedSmith Feedburner Plug-in and then you can set up a feed for just the tags you want. Thanks to Bradgrier.com where I found this useful post which gave me the instructions I needed which I’ll repeat below;

1. In your Wordpress dashboard go to the Plug-ins page. Find the Feedburner FeedSmith Plugin and click Deactivate on the right hand side. When the page refreshes, scroll down and find the Feedburner FeedSmith plugin again and click Edit on the right hand side.

2. The Code will appear in the Plugin Editor Screen. Scroll down until you find the following code;
function ol_feed_redirect()

3. Find the following code below this;
if (is_feed() && $feed != ‘comments-rss2′ && !is_single() &&

and replace it with;
if (is_feed() && $feed != ‘comments-rss2′ && !is_single() && !is_tag() &&

In other words add in the code;
  !is_tag() &&

4. Scroll down and press Update File.
5. Go Back to the Plugins screen and Activate the Feedburner FeedSmith Plugin again.

You should now find that the feed based on tags will work - for example mine is http://heatheronhertravels.com/tag/Europe/feed. In order to manage this feed through Feedburner I set it up as follows;

1. Sign in to Feedburner and go to My Feeds (Top Left on page).

2. Below your existing feeds put your new feed address in the box where it says “Burn a feed right this instant”. I put in the feed above http://heatheronhertravels.com/tag/Europe/feed. Press Next to burn your feed and then save it.

3. I now had a new feedburner feed called http://feeds2.feedburner.com/HeatherOnHerTravelsEurope

Thanks to Bradgrier.com for the instructions on how to do this.

For more articles on ways to develop and improve your Wordpress Blog go to My Blogging Journey Home