Here’s a little plugin that I should have looked for a long time ago!

It adds RSS feeds to all of your categories.  This is very handy if your blog is somewhat diverse and some of your readers want to specifically follow just a category or 2 via a feed.

Its even more useful if you want to establish some interesting layouts on your blog with pages, feeds, and feedburner!

The Plugin

The plugin can be found at Perishable Press.  Its called Category Live Bookmarks which is kind of an old fashioned way to refer to feeds and getting a link to a feed, but there is not too much that is old fashioned about the plugin in its final execution.  Its compatible with WordPress 2.3.

It doesn’t come with an installation folder, which is a little annoying if you like to keep your folders and plugins organized.  Fortunately it only has 3 files.

You Upload and activate the plugin, then replace your normal category list call with the code provided by perishable.

<?php if (function_exists(‘clb_plus’)) { clb_plus(); } ?>

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

You can then set some variables to display the feed icon or a count of articles next to each category or what have you and that’s about it.  There are CSS options if you want to code things more effeciently with CSS.

Rocking and Rolling with Feeds

Once you have this setup, you can achieve some very interesting results with your blog design and organization of articles, pages, and more creating a very dynamic presentation. 

One of these days, I’ll write a more complete document on how to do this, but for now I’ll just leave you with the plugin.  Later on when you are ready for the step by step tutorial but do not want to walk up the stairs yourself, I’ll power up a stair lift tutorial and let you go to town, like that old lady in the Movie Gremlins that gets ejected out of her house.  :)