For Those Reading By RSS

A couple of private posts, including a new (very) short story, are up which might interest you. Private posts never show up on RSS, so I’m mentioning it on the open feed.

Which reminds me, I may try to find a way of having WordPress note when a private post has been made, without it showing the content, just so that RSS subscribers can know that there is something new, even if they can’t see it on the feed. It would seem to be a very useful function, and I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t thought of it yet. Though it might well be obsolete in the new version of WordPress. Hmmm.

UPDATE: It looks as if there’s a plugin for the one function that was missing in WordPress 2.0, the missing function that was keeping me from moving on up to the new version. The wonderful thing about this plugin is that it will allow subscribed members to see private posts in their RSS readers, provided their reader can handle http authentication. (Most can, apparently.) This is nice. Now to see if Livejournal supports this functionality. I’d prefer it, since I miss a lot of private posts when they don’t come up on my own RSS feed.

9 thoughts on “For Those Reading By RSS

  1. Two things:

    1) I’m pretty sure I’m seeing the private posts in my RSS reader. Should I mention them here (you know, because they’re private)? Anyway, I saw the one about the hair and the one about the story. They both showed up in my reader.

    2) There’s no easy way to get to your front page from a single post page (i.e., you have no “home” link, at least not that I could find). Not that I ever visit your front page, but it would be nice if I could click on something (the blog title is standard form) to go to the main page.

  2. Charles,

    1)I was just fiddling to see whether they were indeed being withheld from the RSS feed, and noticed that sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren’t. It’s quite weird, and may have something to do with which feedreader you’re using.

    Which makes this a big priority, an issue I want to sort out pronto.

    2) There actually is a link to the front page — it’s just not in a prominent enough place, I guess. It’s in the sidebar, and the text is “return to home”, but it’s only present in non-frontpage-pages, and perhaps a little too buried since it shows up after the Search panel. So I’m going to move it and change the text. But since I hate that “click on the blog title to go to the frontpage” form, I’m not going to implement it. There… done. Is that better?

  3. Yes, the “return to home” link is now better. Thanks!

    But why do you hate the “click on title to return to the front page”? Is there something in particular that you hate about it? I’m just curious–and I’m definitely not one to judge, since I don’t do that on my site either.

  4. To be completely honest, I am not certain why I have such a strong distaste for it. IT might have something to do with the fact that in the olden days, my site’s banner had the title in varied spots, as part of the image, and I disliked seeing the banner in the same spot on varied images; or it might be that on some deep level I don’t like that the title should lead to the frontpage — after all, clicking on the title at the frontpage would lead to the frontpage, too, which seems a little silly. I don’t know, but anyway, it’s just my idiosyncratic dislike, I suppose.

  5. I have a designer working on a new design for my site, and I specifically requested “click on title to return to the front page�? functionality, partly because it just makes it more usable for readers. I found your home link a while ago, but I had to really look to find it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *