While I was searching for something regarding RSS feeds, I came across a highly informative tutorial named 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks For WordPress written by Jean-Baptiste Jung for Smashing Magazine. I think many bloggers and readers can make use of it and solve certain problems relating to RSS feeds. As RSS is very powerful for blog syndication and WordPress is the most preferred platform for blogs, the problems and their solutions suggested by Jung covers useful RSS-related hacks for WordPress. It contains solutions for the problems and the codes to solve the problems.

The first problem listed in the article relates to the mistakes that you may notice in your new post, but before you make the corrections it will be published in your RSS feed. You can gain a time gap by creating a delay between the publication of the post and its availability in your RSS feed by pasting a code into your theme’s function.php file so that you can edit your post after which only the RSS feed will be published.

Many WordPress blog-beginners may start using FeedBurner only after having created a lot of content and a lot of subscribers might have subscribed to the default WordPress feed. In such a case, how do you start using FeedBurner without losing the existing subscribers? The suggested solution also helps those who change their WP themes quite often and have to edit bloginfo and replace their FeedBurner URL. You can edit the .htaccess file and add a code to redirect visitors to your FeedBurner feeds and to avoid the hassle of manually editing your RSS feed every time you change your themes.

For monetizing RSS feeds, FeedBurner can insert AdSense ads into your feeds, but you cannot use other ads. The suggested solution is to edit the functions.php file and paste a code into it, without editing WordPress core files.

Though your blog may look great, when the post is displayed in an RSS reader, it may not display images. To avoid this problem, it is suggested to add a CSS class to display the image as a block.

Sometimes bloggers publish news or announcements that they do not want to appear in their feeds. The problem can be solved by excluding the numeric ID of the category editing the functions.php file by pasting a code.

Many blogs talk about a lot of different topics, but your subscribers may like only some categories in their feeds. Similarly, you may like to display the names of all your category feeds in a list to your readers by editing any of your theme files, where you want to list your categories and their accompanying feeds, by using the ‘wp list categories’ function.

The last problem and the solution suggested is regarding using WordPress as a CMS to manage online portfolios or company websites, when the RSS feed may not be that useful. The hack to do the job is to paste a code in the functions.php file without disturbing the wp-settings.php core file.