Saving a Search as an RSS Feed
Have you ever searched a site that changes often, and wished you could be alerted when new search results appear? Here’s how! In this workshop, we’ll show you how to save a WordPress search as an RSS feed, so your feed reader can alert you to new content!
Learning outcomes
- How to find the RSS feed for a WordPress search.
- How to subscribe to the RSS feed
Comprehension questions
- Why would you save a search as RSS?
- What can you do with this RSS feed?
Transcript
0:01
Hey folks, welcome to the very first ever Tip of the Week from the HeroPress network. In this video, I’m going to show you a really cool thing you can do with RSS and the search field on any WordPress site.
0:15
I’m here on WPpodcasts.com. And I’m going to search for “mp3.” And I have 13 results. It’s just a standard run of the mill WordPress search. Every WordPress site has the search. Even if there’s not a form, you can put in question mark s equals and then something and it will search for it.
0:36
So here are my results – 13 of them. But I want to keep up with new episodes as they come in with “mp3” in them without having to come here and search for it every time.
0:49
Now, something not everyone knows about WordPress is that everything has an RSS feed – every page, every category, every tag, every search result.
1:01
So if we look at the source code for this search, you’ll see right here is a feed for my search. Let’s make that a little bit bigger.
1:14
Now you’ll note that it just has domain name slash search slash and then the thing I searched for slash feed slash RSS2.
1:24
Now if you take this URL and you replace the domain name with your own blog, and replace “mp3” with something else, you will be searching your own site and getting results in RSS.
1:37
Now, if I just copy this URL and go to my RSS reader, right here, I can add that feed, put it in the podcaster category and click Add.
1:56
And then when I go back to my RSS feeds, there we go. Here are my 13 podcasts with “mp3” in them.
2:04
So there’s one from the WPTavern one from WP Elevation, Post Status, Post Status, Post Status…a lot from Post Status about MP3s. Let’s say I mark them all as read.
2:16
And every day my RSS reader refreshes itself. And when a new episode gets added to WPpodcasts, my feed gets updated. And my reader lets me know.
2:29
So then I can come here and see my new episode without having to search all the time. So you can do this on any site with any search query.
2:41
So if you want to query a news site for something and keep up with the news on there, you can do that. Just about anything. I hope you find it useful.