Update:I’ve posted a Netvibes page that covers my presentation on Tracking Your Organization, using a variety of organizations, and finding content through various site searches and RSS feeds.
I’ll be attending the HighEdWeb09 conference this October in Milwaukee. I’ve attended this conference twice over the past several years and have found it to be one of the most invaluable conferences out there for information gain, networking and sharing.
I’ll be doing a poster session on Tracking your Organization: Finding and Tracking the media and user-generated content across the Web. Will have a laptop demoing my shtick and as well as the needed poster.
Am looking forward to meeting fellow tweeters and higher ed devotees at the conference!
Well, not in the usual way we think of at the dinner table. This refers to getting content out of your website (or anyone’s for that matter) and having it appear in multiple places. It’s simple with the use of RSS feeds generated out of your site.
I call it “feeding yourself” because that’s exactly what you’re doing – adding content through the usual method of a blog post, or new content page, and grabbing the RSS feed to have it appear in pages in multiple locations.
My process below I did for Wordpress, but works for any site that allows Javascript to be embedded into its page. You’ll need to first modify your Wordpress editor so that it allows you to paste HTML/js into it. See my previous article on embedding a Twitter feed.
Here’s how to feed yourself:
Find your RSS feed – it’s the small button that says “RSS”, usually in the web address window, or as an icon somewhere on a web page.
Copy the web address of your RSS feed from the web address window.
Paste your feed URL where it asks for it on that page. Make your choices among the different items as to whether to show the title, descriptions, channel, etc. I found selecting text and NOT to use HTML works better.
“Preview Feed” to make sure you’re getting the content you need. Note that the appearance will take on that of your website’s CSS. Make adjustments to the selectors then….
“Generate Javascript” to get the code to embed.
In your web page, paste the Javascript code where you’d like the RSS feed to appear.
And there it is! For the feed below, I chose NOT to show the Channel, not show descriptions, but show the title and date:
Yipee! And now you’ve “fed yourself” – the code can be plopped in wherever you can paste javascript code.
Ellen Kanner is a web consultant for higher education, non-profits and beyond through Kanner Kreative.com. She prides herself on creating straight-up user-centered designs, solid information architecture providing functional and interesting web-based experiences. Ellen provides consulting in all areas of web design, development and social media, and formerly was the Web Producer/Designer at Dartmouth College. Her adventures, musings about web stuff and higher ed, along with random thoughts are contained herein. The views expressed are hers alone and not connected to anyone else with whom she is affiliated. What I read and follow on a regular basis. ✉
