To those who are subscribed to the feed, you would have seen frequent updates with small posts with usually two-to-three line sarcastic, and as pointed out, often biased commentary. Those posts don’t have their own page (actually they do, but I keep you away from it), and their home on the site is a dedicated page for linked posts.

In the past, there were huge gaps between my articles. While that didn’t bother me (because I like to write at my own pace), I realised it might lead subscribers to think the blog was dead or not worth following. Also, it didn’t make sense to write a whole 400 word article on every small issue that I wanted to bring to the notice of my readers. Which is why, I decided to fashion mini-posts … that double up as a linked list. To make it convenient for everyone to use, I included mini-posts in my main feed, albeit with slightly different formatting and organisation so that they’re easy and effective to use. The problem is, not many people know exactly how they work¹.

It’s extremely simple. The linked posts show up just like normal posts and in the normal chronology. The only difference between individual articles and mini-posts is that the title of the mini-post is linked to the article in question, and the unicode arrow ‘→’ at the bottom is linked to the entry on the linked list page. I keep comments disabled on mini-posts because they are not really proper posts that ask for comments (I have been told off for it in the past), so mini-posts don’t have their own post page.

Main posts on the other hand are just like any normal entry in a feed, but I’ve included a comments link at the bottom of the article content so that if someone wants to leave a comment, they have a easy way to do that. Unfortunately, using the Wordpress tag to echo out a link for comments doesn’t work like it is supposed to. In Google Reader for example, feeds are cached, which means if you see the post after a long time, you will continue to see ‘No Comments’ even though there might be comments. If they fix it, well and good, otherwise I’ll figure out something.

This did take a bit of playing around with the feed generator, which involved editing the feed generation files in the wp-include folder. The problem though is that every time there is an update, it overwrites the changes. Thankfully, WinSCP has a smart sync option that compares and only updates files which need to be updated; I’ve yet to find an equivalent for Leopard. I found some questions on Wordpress forums regarding this, but they didn’t help much and now I can’t find them again. So if anyone has a way to include custom feed-generators with a template, please let me know.

Hope this helps everyone view the feed effectively. Suggestions for further improvements are always welcome.