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Microstock Photography Forum - General => Symbiostock => Symbiostock - General => Topic started by: Leo Blanchette on May 04, 2013, 15:19
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Here is a small tutorial for you.
SEO - its a big part of the theme, right?
You can do a lot of cool things with feeds. Technically they are a version of XML which carry lots of info for machine use. Similar to how your sites communicate.
Wordpress has a set of feed types it uses. Here are some examples:
http://example.com/?feed=rss
http://example.com/?feed=rss2
http://example.com/?feed=rdf
http://example.com/?feed=atom
http://example.com/wp-rss.php
http://example.com/wp-rss2.php
http://example.com/wp-rdf.php
http://example.com/wp-atom.php
Lets start by showing you a few "variables" to trigger certain types of feeds.
Your image page is technically a custom post type called "image".
post_type=image ...means something to wordpress.
So, a basic "image" feed:
http://www.clipartillustrations.com/feed/?post_type=image (http://www.clipartillustrations.com/feed/?post_type=image)
It also works out that this shows your images from "latest" and onward. So your users, if subscribed, can see if you have new images.
Your images are indexed by a custom taxonomy called "image-tags", which are whatever keywords you've chosen:
image-tags=white
http://www.clipartillustrations.com/feed/?post_type=image&image-tags=white (http://www.clipartillustrations.com/feed/?post_type=image&image-tags=white)
The first part separating your variables from the URL is a "?" after that you can separate them with "&" as you can see there.
To take it a step further, you can feed it to www.feedburner.com (http://www.feedburner.com) which also has useful features that you can use for promotion.
You can also plug your feed into the RSS widget to show new images coming into your site. A bit further, you can also plug your network buddies feeds into your site! How cool is that?
Feeds are not just for humans - different search engines and services will spider your site and even sometimes rip content (thats not always a bad thing) which promotes you as well.
Feeds are just really useful in general - you can totally make up new ideas on how to use them to promote.
For instance, lets say you have some sort of article site (or you intend to be a hub site) you can actually "aggregate" your newest images as blog posts on that site.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-rss-multi-importer/ (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-rss-multi-importer/)
As you probably know, wordpress was chosen because it has so many powerful features. I hope you guys can use this to get your work out there and gain an advantage through technology, like Kip did in Nepolean Dynamite.
Napoleon Dynamite - Kip's Wedding Song to Lafawnduh [HD] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERCzN91JicA#noexternalembed-ws)
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great info - I can see that post_type is a field in zyi_posts, but where does it look for image_type?
i'd like to have feeds for each major category. I realize that categories aren't the same in wp as in sym, so how would we get a feed for a given category such as 'animals-images'?
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http://blog.example.com/feed/?taxonomy=taxonomy-name
If you are unsure which name a category a name has, you can just copy/paste the slug from your category admin area.
For instance, featured images:
http://www.clipartillustrations.com/feed/?image-type=symbiostock-featured-images (http://www.clipartillustrations.com/feed/?image-type=symbiostock-featured-images)
If you have "Animals Images" then it would be "animals-images" or whatever the "slug" for that taxonomy is. The name may also work (with hyphens or possibly "+" signs.
You will get the hang of it :D
Edit: Here is another one I snatched from category area: http://www.clipartillustrations.com/feed/?image-type=da-vinci-images (http://www.clipartillustrations.com/feed/?image-type=da-vinci-images)
Sometimes they might not "look" good but they are still valid I'm sure.
You may also be able to get a plugin which adds "featured images" to your feeds, and that might also dress up your custom post type feed a bit.
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great -- biggest challenge right now is figuring out what the various parameters are - eg, category stored in 'image-type'
I plan to link to the sym site from my other sites
demo: http://cascoly.com/latest-images.asp (http://cascoly.com/latest-images.asp)