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CogDog The Blog

An early 90s builder of web stuff and blogging Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling (#ds106 #4life), photography, bending WordPress, and serendipity in the infinite internet river. He thinks it's weird to write about himself in the third person. And he is 100% into the Fediverse (or tells himself so) Tooting as @cogdog@cosocial.ca

Blog Pile

One Tweet. Boom.

Two years ago. One tweet. Thinking abt starting #ds106 radio station that class runs. 15 week experiment. Start it with a show @brlamb and I should've done years ago — Jim Groom (@jimgroom) January 16, 2011 One blog post. http://networkeffects.ca/?p=655 One free-form web radio station born. designed by ds106 student Andrew Wallingham When ds106 started […]

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I am a Teaching Serf

I teach digital storytelling (ds106) online as an adjunct for the University of Mary Washington. I earn just enough doing this to pay for my health insurance. I am not doing this for the money, it’s for the love, and to learn how to teach online. I have my savings and some other things I […]

Photography

Compfight Makes Happy Dog

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Stuart`Dootson I remain a big fan of compfight as my favorite tool for finding creative commons licensed photos from flickr. Just tonight I noticed the interface is updated- previously, clicking one of the small icon results launched the photo in flickr, now you get […]

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Howdy, ETMOOC

My introduction video for the newly launched ETMOOC – something I might be lukewarm about were it not something that Alec Couros was fostering. His own network connectivity, not the linking for the same of linking, is something you want to be part of- witness over 1000 people who signed up, 200 of them fitting […]

Wordpress

Building the ETMOOC Blog Hub (part 2)


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by epc

In my last post, I quickly overviewed the wordpress customizations I did to set up the ETMOOC Blog Hub. Using the Feedwordpress plugin for a few feeds is easy to do, and it does a rather slick job of finding feeds from a blog URL.

The messy part is dealing with a lot of blog feeds. Getting this part right is more than just tossing URLs into a magic box, you have to have a good grasp of how RSS feeds work in different blogs.

It’s messy.

Because of those pesky humans.

Over at ds106 we have a rather elegant blog registration system that Martha Burtis designed, that actually does a web registration and automatically enters someone’s new blog into Feedwordpress.

The thing is there is a bit of variability to deal with when allowing people to bring in any blog platform (that is what we want), because it can eb confusing to the individual, especially if they are new to blogging, what we ask of them.

The thing is, it’s most easy if someone says, “I am going to do this ETMOOC thing, so I am going to make a new blog just for that stuff” – all we need is the blog URL and Feedwordpress can figure out the right TSS feed to use.

It gets more complicated when someone has an existing blog they want to use to do ETMOOC writing. There is nothing wrong with this approach (especially since it is mine!) but we don’t want to subscribe to everything the blog publishes- we just want posts that are related to ETMOOC. So the person with the blog has to decide (and understand how) to use tags/categories in their posts to mark things they want to syndicate.

This is quite a powerful concept that is easy to overlook – it means I can do things like use a single blog to selectively push content to different places through an understanding of the flow.

This is compounded by the different ways blog platforms are st up for this kind of syndication.

Messy.