Unfortunately, there is no way in DAP to protect an individual post *prior* to publishing it, and once it’s published, it’s in the RSS feed, regardless of whether you subsequently protect it in DAP. So what ends up happening (in my experience) is that the RSS feed then has two entries for the post – one pre-protection (with the full title and excerpt/content) and one post-protection (with “(title unknown)” as the description). It does not “completely disappear from your feed.”
Excluding a post or category from the RSS feed *at* time of publication apparently requires custom PHP code, either from another plug-in or an alteration of the theme’s functions.php file.
Deborah,
If you use the “protect a URL” feature before publishing your post then it doesn’t seem to appear in the RSS feed at all. You don’t need to wait and add it via the existing post/pages list in the content responder after it’s published.
You can see what to use as the URL (i.e. the post’s permalink) while your post still has draft status.
Hope this helps solve the issue you’re experiencing?
@Mandy – My solution to this ended up being (a) protecting categories rather than posts and (b) installing the Stealth Publish plug-in. Far easier, to my mind, than going to and from DAP before and after publishing.