I recently started a daily writing practice and while just using the existing blog, seemed to be the fastest way, I also did not want the posts in the main blog and RSS feed.

You can find the posts in Notebook category. By default, WordPress does not let you do that though.

Ultimate Category Excluder

The Ultimate Category Excluder (what a name) plugin lets you hide a category from the latest blog posts as well as RSS feeds. It is rather dimple to configure and does what it says it does.

It does however hide the category from all RSS feeds. I anted to have a feed for the category though, so people interested in following the notebook, could subscribe. It also allows for syndication like in Rixx notebook collection.

Quick & Dirty fix

My goal was to set this up quickly and I was already considering just running a hugo or other static generator. That would have taken quite a bit of time to properly set up as well though.

But then I found a post on the plugin’s support forums that describes a quick & dirty fix. In line 152 157 204 in /plugins/ultimate-category-excluder/ultimate-category-excluder.php change (EDIT: The line changed to 204 with the current version)

if ( $query->is_feed ) {

to

if ( $query->is_feed && !$query->is_archive ) {

It works and from a quick glance at the rest of the plugin’s code should not have further side effects.

That change still comes with one Drawback, I have to do it every time the plugin is updated and I can not rely on the integrity check for the plugin file since it always comes up as changed.

This can only be a short term solution and I would not recommend it for the use in customer projects. I hope excluding a category only from the main feed will be added as a feature to the plugin, but if it does not, I will eventually have to write my own solution.