I believe it was John Gruber who started the trend: adding small unicode symbols in front of noteworthy feed items. Because this was such a great idea, I’ve started providing little ♥ icons next to noteworthy feed icons.
This, I have turned into a WordPress plugin, which you can now download from the official WordPress plugin repository.
Note: I believe you have to have your blog set to UTF-8 (Settings > Writing) for this to work, and of course you have to pick a unicode character as the special feed item.
This plugin got a minor bump today, fixing a spelling error that could cause people to tear hair out.
[...] Special Feed Items – Have you ever wanted to draw special attention to a certain post in your feed? This plugin will allow you to insert a unicode heart before the title of that post so people will be more likely to notice it. It does not change anything on your actual site. [...]
[...] Special Feed Items – Have you ever wanted to draw special attention to a certain post in your feed? This plugin will allow you to insert a unicode heart before the title of that post so people will be more likely to notice it. It does not change anything on your actual site. [...]
Nice plugin, very helpful and easy to use, thanks!
[...] Special Feed Items. This is handy for drawing attention to a post in an RSS feed. It adds a Unicode heart to a post, so the eye is drawn to it. This does not change anything on your actual site. [...]
[...] Special Feed Items – Have you ever wanted to draw special attention to a certain post in your feed? This plugin will allow you to insert a unicode heart before the title of that post so people will be more likely to notice it. It does not change anything on your actual site. [...]
[...] Special Feed Items – Have you ever wanted to draw special attention to a certain post in your feed? This plugin will allow you to insert a unicode heart before the title of that post so people will be more likely to notice it. It does not change anything on your actual site. [...]
[...] Special Feed Items – Если вы когда-либо хотели, чтобы пользователи обратили внимание на определенную статью в вашем блоге, то стоит обратиться к плагину Special Feed Items. Данное приложение разместит небольшое изображение сердца в заголовке отмеченных вами статей. [...]
Joen – I love the idea of this plugin, but when I activated it, all my non-favourite post titles were preceded by a ‘?’ (questionmark, without the quotes), and the feed did not update when new posts were published. There problems went away when I deactivated the plugin. (using wp2.9.2)
Are you using the plain RSS2 feed? Or are you using an Atom feed or something else?
Also, try go in to the admin section, the special feed items settings menu, and replace the star symbol with something else. The question mark is clearly a character set issue. Also, does this issue appear in all feed readers, or only in some? How does my feed look to you?
It was only after reading this post again that I realized I had to use unicode! Everything works great now. Thanks for the plugin. ( May I suggest a comment about using unicode in the readme file for uninitiated folks like me?)
That’s a good point. I’ll see what I can do.
Thank you for a great plugin. I’m very appreciate it. Cheers!