Never Miss a ds106 Assignment Announcement

Yes there was some trouble on the ds106 web site Sunday night, right about 30 minutes before all weekly assignments were due. Hmmm is there some correlation? Some students got a little worried

http://twitter.com/Twerkooo/status/250068227814744064

@RudyXtable the #ds106 website isn't loading for me at all! -_-

— Kiersten Pyrtle (@KierstenPyrtle) September 24, 2012

@cogdog no link to this weeks assignments? Sad day =( #ds106

— Rob Skoczylas (@sgtsocks) September 24, 2012

The thing is that we rely on our friends at our web hosting provider to restart the server.

But you ought to know there are end arounds. Like knowing how to get web pages that Google caches. Yep. Google keeps copy of recent web pages, just for you. This is really what we mean by good google juice!

If you are seeking #ds106 week 4 assignment try this cached view of web page http://t.co/l7w9CrAp

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) September 24, 2012

Martha carved out some valuable advice for students Oh Noes! The #ds106 site is down!. It was during our Wednesday discussion that anther idea came up that would be perfect for people (a) wanting to know the next week’s announcement as soon as it is published and (b) as a backup to have copies of the last lessons.

Repeat after me, Google Reader.

The lesson to keep in mind is that WordPress automatically creates an RSS feed for many kinds of content it generates, in this case an archive of a category. For example, the URL that lists all of the weekly announcements for assignments is

http://ds106.us/category/fall-2012-assignments/

and all you have to do is add “feed” to the end to get a URL you can subscribe to in Google Reader

http://ds106.us/category/fall-2012-assignments/feed/

This will keep updating while you leave the window open, but more importantly, it keeps a copy of the announcement posts in your reader. Neat, eh?

And what about the Daily Create? Why it has an RSS feed too!

http://tdc.ds106.us/feed

So you can check the past daily creates any time, even if the site blinks out again.

Can you think of other things you may want to keep track of this way?

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