Here are some WordPress-related news and notes I’ve run across over the past week and felt were worth sharing with everyone:

• Price Reduction at Theme Hybrid - The theme club by Justin Tadlock, Theme Hybrid, is currently offering a $10.00 membership to his theme club for the first 100 members.  You can read more about the club here.
• How to Integrate Pagination into your WordPress Theme - Jean-Baptiste Jung has explained how to build PageNavi plugin functionality directly into your WordPress theme.
• 15 Premium Quality Free WordPress Themes - Noupe is at it again, this time with a collection of free WordPress themes that they consider to be premium quality.  I think they did a pretty good job narrowing this down to 15 quality themes.
• How to Add PollDaddy Polls on Your WordPress Blog - Leland of Theme Lab has written a detailed write up explaining how to add PollDaddy polls to your WordPress blog.
• Building a Control Panel for Your WordPress Theme - Custom Theme Design has published a great post about building a control panel into your WordPress theme.  The example even includes code snippets.
• How to Exclude Categories from your RSS Feed - Have a few categories on your blog that you don’t want your feed readers to see?   Web Kreation has written a great post explaining how to prevent certain categories from showing up in your feed.

If your website offers a feed and you care about protecting your copyrighted content, one thing you should make sure to do is have some sort of copyright notice within your blog’s feed.

There are a variety of WordPress plugins out there that allow you to create a footer for your WordPress feed, including Feed Footer, which we have previously reviewed here.   Some offer rotated feeds, others allow you to use HTML to display whatever you want, but for the average person with a blog this is mostly fluff.

If you just want the ability to basically add a copyright notice or use a small amount of HTML to promote a product/service, then you will want to check out the RSS Footer WordPress plugin.    It allows you to easily plugin in a line of code and choose where in your code it should be displayed.

Have you ever noticed that many next generation web browsers will often detect a blog’s feed by displaying a feed icon on the right side of the address bar?  This is something many estabalished sites have taken the time to set up to encourage feed subscribers, but something that most WordPress themes don’t do by default.  

In order to instruct next generation web browsers to automatically detect your WordPress blog’s feed(s), you’ll simply need to do is make a quick modification to your header.php file and add the following code:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Comments Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?>" />

If your theme already has the first code in place for the RSS Feed, then you’ll just need to paste the second set of code in to display your RSS Comments Feed.  You can also swap out the PHP code and instead use your Feedburner feed address if you’d like.

If you aren’t sure if you should bother to do this or not, never underestimate the power of suggestion.  It is an unobtrusive way to promote your RSS Feed and Comments Feed while not using up any valuable screen real estate.