Subscribers to the feed on my personal blog got a surprise message in their email — a business message I did not intend for them to receive and a message they probably did not care to receive.
And you know what THAT means… LOST subscribers.
So, what did I do wrong (THIS time)?
Well, I failed to set up my Feedburner feed to exclude posts from a particular category. When I posted to that category, the list on my Aweber account that uses the Blog Broadcast service, emailed that post to all the subscribers on the list.
Here's an example.
If I don't want NPT newsletter subscribers to receive posts that I make to my XOX (personal) category, that category must be removed from the Feedburner feed.
Here are the steps to take:
- Sign into WordPress
- Go to “Categories”
- Mouse over the name of the category you want to exclude and take note of the ID in the status bar as shown below. In this case, the ID is “381“.
- Now log into your Google Feedburner account and click on “Edit Feed Details” for your feed.
- Under “Original Feed Details” add ?cat=-318 (or whatever your cat ID happens to be) to your feed URL.
- Now test your Feedburner Feed and you will that posts from the ‘offensive' category no longer appear.
If you would like to remove 2 or more categories from a feed, simply add an ampersand before each category number ( @amp; ), i.e. https://rosalindgardner.com/blog?cat=-381@-642
Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!
Cheers,
Thanks Rosalind,
Super clear explanation and it worked perfectly for me.
Great work!
Matt
Thanks, Matt. Glad I could help.
Salam n Hola,
Strange, I could not get feedburner to to work with the ampersand. I just used plain comma.
Hi Ros,
Nice article, in terms of overall content value. I was unaware that you could do that with your FeedBurner feeds, as others have mentioned, and I really appreciate the tip. Thank you very much!
However, not to be nitpicky here, but I would like to point out a couple of errors in the article. Yeah, because if I caught them, then that means someone else probably will, too. And I figured you would like to know when someone catches mistakes, so that you can correct them for the sake of future readers.
First, and this is obviously a typo, in step 5, you have the number “318” instead of “381” as in the rest of the example.
Second, as Gus already pointed out above, the HTML special character code for an ampersand begins with “&” not “@” (i.e., &).
Sorry to be so trivial, but I am sort of ANALytical when it comes to grammar and just can’t seem to help myself (LOL). Other than that, though, this is a very good article, and I’m glad that I read it. Thanks again and have magnificent, prosperous, and God blessed day.
Best Regards,
Michael Brock
Well geez, WP stripped the escape character.
It should have been – & a m p ; (remove all the spaces).
That’s how to get the ampersand character in text streams I think.
Call me curious, but isn’t an “ampersand = “&”?
The at-sign = “@”.
Most parameters passed to functions look for “&”.
The escape character for the ampersand is “&” (semicolon included, quotes are not)
But, if that’s what Feedburner is looking for….
Did not know you could do that! Hope you didn’t lose to many subscribers. Thanks again for some new knowledge in my day.
Great info as usual Ros. I don’t yet use Feedburner, but will file this post so when I do I know how to fix this issue.
Nice Article to read. Now I have learnt that how to remove the category from the feed.
Thanks Roaslind.
Hi Ros, As always useful information. I am still finding my way around WordPress. I am very happy with it at present,but still so much to learn. I file all your info for future reference. Thanks so much. Lyn
I’m saving this one. I had no idea you could do that!
Thanks Ros,
Sandy