However, most people look for feed links in the header or sidebar. Reconsider adding the linked image to your sidebar in a simple text widget.

Remember, feeds are built into WordPress and need no link nor special anything. Most browsers automatically recognize feeds and if they add your site to their feed reader or using their feed reader tool, it will go in automatically. You don’t have to do anything. This is why many feel feed icons and links are clutter.

Here is another thought. Why not treat each post as a “landing page” concept? Include a “summary” with links to the story so far and a link to the first post in the series and the most recent post. It might trigger more visitors to your site to track those pages down, and help to define which story is which. Good marketing strategy, too.

LOL. Backticks only works with some forum software, never on blogs or blog comments. See Writing and Publishing Code in Your WordPress Blog Posts for help as I would love to see the code.

I already have split feeds as an option for my users. The majority choose to subscribe to the main one, though, so I need to make things as clear in that as possible.

Does this still work in the latest versions of WordPress? I’m running on 2.5.1, and I’ve been trying to edit feeds-rss2.php, seeing as that’s where wp-rss2.php directs one to now, but it’s been to no avail; the code doesn’t appear to do anything to the feed. I am converting my present WordPress theme to a tumblelog style, and I want it to be clear to my readers what category my content is in, as I have a ton of different content that needs to stay separate on-site and in-feed. (For instance, I don’t want people confusing my fiction writing for a personal post–which has happened for one of my first person stories! Quite strange, really.)

On the front-end, it’s not a problem to get WP to display categories in titles; but for feeds, I can’t seem to get it to work. I am basically looking for functionality similar to what you discussed here. For example, my feed titles would preferably look like “Article: Post Title Here” or “Poetry: Driftwood.”

Customization comes with a price. You screw it up, you fix it. I’ve spent hours and days obsessing over every little detail in my full WordPress site. I have to admit that wordpress.com takes a lot of that stress away – though the inability to do some things adds, but doesn’t replace the amount of stress maintaining a full site does.