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August 13, 2007 8:13 AM

I'd like to make the summary in the RSS feed for my webcomic (using Wordpress and Feedburner) more betterer.

We update four times a week, and currently the RSS feed for each date shows our pithy comments for that particular day. I'd really like to do something like Josh over at Comics Curmudgeon manages, where the RSS feed features a teaser sentence that actively engages readers. Feedburner offers a summary function, but it appears to apply that to all entries, and I'd like something a bit more interactive, such as "Check out what Yavin IV's staff thinks of this week's books!" then "Oh, ho, ho! Aaron's stuck his fist in a bee's hive! Hijinx should ensue!"

Googling has led me into Wordpress's horrible "Oh, you know this already" documentation and I couldn't make heads or tails of things. Can you help? Best answer gets an appearance in the strip!

posted by beaucoupkevin to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

I don't use the CC feed, so I'm not sure if I follow. I think you're saying that you'd like each RSS item to either (a) also include or (b) consist solely of a teaser of some sort separate from the content of the post itself. So the teaser text would be a separate entity, not displayed on the actual page of the comic once the feed-reading fan clicks through.

If that's the case: create a custom field (any name you like—'blurb' or 'summary') and throw the text of your blurb in there. Then edit the rss feed scripts (in /wp-includes/ directory of your WP install, feed-rss.php and etc) to render the custom field as part of the RSS item—the key call is WP's get_post_meta() function, more detail on which if you'd like.
posted by cortex at 9:30 AM on August 13, 2007