DualFeeds - a Wordpress Plugin

Cape Town, February 24, 2009 - by Bianca Gubalke

After this weekend’s outstanding YCADEMY SEMINAR that was spiced up with many eye-opening if not jaw-dropping insider-tips and secrets by Internet Wizzard Yorgo Nestoridis to help all participants build their Authority and Online Business through the power of Blogging, it’s a matter of getting familiar with the new tools and strategies.

As our Blogs are all using Semiomantics Scripts - and operate as such within a Wordpress based  semantic CMS Framework - and as Syndication via RSS Feeds is a modern way of automatically getting the latest News we are interested in, that are relevant to our topics and themes and that we want to integrate into what we are doing or writing about - we also want to offer the same in exchange to readers who like what they see on our blogs.

For this purpose the “Wordpress Developer Community” offers a great plugin called DualFeeds.

As learned at the past Ycademy Seminar, DualFeeds allows us to place different feed icons on our Blogs - there are basically 3 types of feeds:

1. A full post feed from the Blog - which would basically be the - http://auctiontalklive.com/feed  - allowing syndication of full articles;

2. A feed for Excerpts (a summary) only and

3.  A  Comment Feed.

The developer, Stephen Cronin explains how it works:

“DualFeeds catches all feed requests (except comments) and formats the output: By default it strips the tag giving the full post. If it finds dualfeed=2 in the URL, it creates a summary as follows (in order of precedence, first to last):

* The extract is used, if one exists.
* The post is cut at the tag, if it exists.
* The post is cut after a user-definable number of characters.”

It’s a modern way of building a readership and we could compare this to multiple Opt-ins.

It’s a matter of personal choices; some readers or subscribers prefer having the full post to read right away while others prefer excerpts or summaries they can quickly skim through and then follow up at a later stage. So the advantage of DualFeeds from Wordpress is that they offer both formats and the subscriber makes his own choice.

Another advantage is that they can be neatly integrated where we want them, at the top or at the bottom of our text or post, either as the well-visible typical orange icons of which quite a selection is offered and you just choose the optimal match for your design - or as simple text.

It also includes Feedburner - which is in itself so complex that it deserves a whole article!

If you just got started, DualFeeds is yet another great Wordpress plugin to be integrated!

Happy Blogging with Semiomantics!

Bianca Gubalke

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