8 WordPress Plugins for Feed Subscribers

Today in our wordpress plugin series, we will explore plugins related to feeds. Feed is the reason, I love blogs over static websites.

If you are seriously into blogging, then one thing which matters most is feed readers. Many bloggers, including me, display their FeedBurner subscribers count proudly at prominent places on their site.

So here is list of plugins which will improve your feed count as well interaction with feed subscribers.

1. WWSGD Plugin

This plugin which uses name of one of the top web celebrity Seth Godin, allows you to display a subscription reminder message above or below blog post.

You can control position & content of message. Also you can customize if message is to be displayed always for only or few initial page views.

Link: What Would Seth Godin Do by Richard K Miller

2. FeedBurner FeedSmith Plugin

If you use FeedBurner and love its subscriber count chicklet, then this plugin is must for you.

WordPress have lots of feed formats and most probably you had burnt only one of them with FeedBurner. Now if a user access your wordpress feeds via other URLs then their subscription will not be counted towards FeedBurner count.

This plugin will take care of this. You just give it your FeedBurner URLs and it will redirect all wordpress custom feed requests to your FeedBurner feed.

Originally developed by Steve Smith, this plugin is now officially maintained by FeedBurner.

Link: FeedBurner FeedSmith Plugin by Steve Smith & FeedBurner

3. Full Text Feeds

There was a bug in wordpress which used to cut your feeds in the middle of the post. This behavior used to annoy blogger who like to publish full text feeds.

I am not sure if this bug is fixed in latest version of wordpress as I have modified wordpress core feed files completely when applying firefox full feed hack.

Anyway, if you see partial feeds even after choosing option to display full feeds, you can use this plugin to overcome wordpress bug.

Link: Full Text Feed Plugin by Ronald Heft, Jr.

4. URL Absolutifier WordPress Plugin

URL Absolutifier changes all relative URLs in posts to absolute URL, to make the entries work in feed readers that don’t work with relative URLs.

I used a relative URL trick for higher earnings from AdSense product referrals long time back. If you are not sure about your usage of relative URLs then I will strongly recommend you should activate this plugin and then just forget it. I really feel this should be default behavior of wordpress.

Link: URL Absolutifier WordPress Plugin by Scott Yang

5: Feed Footer Plugin

This plugin allow you to customize footer text of each post in feed completely. I use this to show referral ads in my feeds. Please do not try AdSense or any JavaScript code in Feed Footer. It will not work as feed readers ignores JavaScript.

This plugin is really basic, but I don’t mind taking some efforts for some extra bucks.

Link: Feed Footer Plugin by Sherief Mursyidi

6. Similar Posts for Feeds Plugin

Many time, by giving full text feeds, blogger feel they are loosing page-views as a reader may never check their blog.

I use backlinking to my old posts whenever possible to bring readers back to the blog. But often such links go unnoticed or you may not find old post to link back if you are writing on a new topic.

Then its always good idea to display few related posts at the bottom which often attracts clicks. Of course too many links may annoy your reader. So do not show something like 20 related post!

Link: Similar Posts by Rob Marsh

7. Feed Widget Plugin

This plugin will add a WordPress widget, which will display links to various relevant feeds for your WordPress blog. It will always at least display links to the two standard feeds: All Entries and All Comments. It will also display links to category feeds, post feeds or search feeds, depending on the current page being viewed.

I used this long time back. But now this blog have three top level feeds, so I guess using this plugin here will result in too many options. I will definitely add this plugin to my orkutfeeds blog.

Link: Feed Widget Plugin by Ketsugi

8. RSS Footer

This is very simple plugin. It allows you to insert any message including HTML code into the feeds. You can also choose if added message is to be displayed at top or bottom of the post.

You can use this plugin for advertising instead of above Feed footer plugin. Main difference is, RSS Footer adds same footer at the end of every post, while above Feed footer allows you to add different footer for each post.

One plus point with RSS footer is, it allows addition of link back to your original post, which is good SEO as explained by Daniel Scocco.

Link: RSS Footer Plugin by Joost de Valk

That’s it for the day! Tomorrow I will post more about plugins which will improve navigation of your wordpress blog.

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