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Category LiveBookmarks Plugin

Category LiveBookmarks Icon
CLB+
Enthusiastic Firefox users enjoy the luxury of Live Bookmarks, a feature of Firefox that automatically discovers and updates RSS feeds. Web pages with available feeds are indicated by the orange feed icon located in the browser’s address bar.

Clicking the feed icon presents a list of all available feeds for that particular webpage. Users then select which feeds they would like Firefox to bookmark, track, and automatically update. Makes subscribing stupid easy. Very handy indeed.

Note: This article explains the underlying technology for this plugin. If you already are familiar with Firefox Live Bookmarks and WordPress feeds, you can skip the following discussion and download the free WordPress plugin »

Manual method

Providing Live Bookmark feeds to your readers is as easy as adding “link” tags for each feed to the head section of each webpage. Then, simply set the “type” attribute to application/atom+xml or application/rss+xml, and away you go. Not so bad, but a bit tedious, perhaps.

WordPress users typically transmit RSS feeds for both comments and posts, and frequently provide individual category feeds. Further, each feeds may be provided via a variety of formats, including RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0, and Atom. Manually adding the feed links to the header.php file works if you don’t care about context sensitivity, because the same links would appear for all pages, whether the feeds were actually available from there or not. Fortunately, there is a more sophisticated method for managing your Live Bookmark feeds…

WordPress plugin

Introducing Category LiveBookmarks (CLB), a WordPress plugin designed to simplify the process of adding complete Live Bookmark functionality to your website. Category LiveBookmarks seamlessly generates “Live-Bookmark” feed links for each of your WordPress blog categories. It will generate feed links for all categories on your main blog page, and only relevant feeds on single-post-view pages. Also, CLB automatically omits feeds with zero posts, and excludes subcategory feeds. CLB is designed for Firefox’s Live Bookmarks and Opera’s Livemarks. Generates strictly valid XHTML markup. Tested and verified with WordPress 2.0+. Should work with WP 1.5+ as well (no guarantees).

This plugin has been adapted from ArunRocks plugin, Livemarks. Many important modifications have been made to the original, such as are summarized here. To download the plugin, visit the CLB+ homepage.

Installation and Usage

Unzip file, add to wp-content/plugins directory, upload, activate, and enjoy! There are also two options within the PHP file itself that you will probably want to customize: Comment feed links and blog title.

About the Author
Jeff Starr = Web Developer. Security Specialist. WordPress Buff.
WP Themes In Depth: Build and sell awesome WordPress themes.

14 responses to “Category LiveBookmarks Plugin”

  1. Luther Blissett 2007/03/19 12:56 pm

    I’ve been using this plugin and really like it. One (minor) problem I’ve discovered that I’d like your advice on – on pages (which can’t be categorized) it’s making a feed link to an Uncategorized feed, which doesn’t exist (this generates 404 errors in our link-checking system). Is there a way to have the plugin not take effect on pages (as opposed to posts) since there will never be any categories there anyway?

    Thanks!

  2. Perishable 2007/03/19 1:28 pm

    Luther,

    Yes, try replacing any instances of the default function call such as:

    <?php clb_plus() ?> or
    <?php if (function_exists('clb_plus')) { clb_plus(); } ?>

    ..with the following conditional call:

    <?php if (!is_page()) {
    if (function_exists('clb_plus')) { clb_plus(); }
    } ?>

    ..then, only non-pages will be served the CLB function, thereby eliminating those nasty 404’s.

    Jeff

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Perishable Press is operated by Jeff Starr, a professional web developer and book author with two decades of experience. Here you will find posts about web development, WordPress, security, and more »
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