Tag Archives: RSS feeds

Subscribe to feeds on private blogs

Today we released a new plugin for WordPress that allows you to subscribe to the RSS feeds of private blogs using any RSS reader.

When you are logged in and viewing a private blog, the RSS feed links will now contain a special key unique to you and the blog that gives your reader access to the feed. There is nothing special you need to do, just subscribe as usual and feeds from private blogs will now work without redirecting your reader to the login page.

Continue reading →

WordPress feeds can now include pages

During the past few years new versions of WordPress have made this system much easier to use — and our community has made use of these new abilities to make a wide range of sites structured in many ways.

Most of the content in WordPress sites are Posts, chronologically ordered entries that make up a ‘blog’ or news site. Pages on the other hand, are non-time-dependent content that can be arranged in a hierarchy. Traditionally, Pages in WordPress sites were used mostly for describing the blog, contact information, or other content that rarely changes and isn’t ‘newsworthy’. (more on Posts vs. Pages)

Recently, a number of sites have been making increasingly large use of Pages, such as to hold curricular resources that are then referenced from Posts describing assignments that use them. For sites that make significant use of Pages, site-owners can now enable the RSS Includes Pages plugin so that new pages are added to your site’s main feed. For course sites in WordPress, enabling this plugin will allow page additions to be fed into the Course Hub as updates.

We still recommend making use of Posts in WordPress sites to share new material with readers rather than heavily using Pages as Pages are still second-class citizens in many ways (such as support for tagging and categorization). With the new RSS Includes Pages plugin, Page-heavy sites can now feed new content to the Course Hub and others subscribed to their feeds.

RSS – Really Special Snacks or Really Simple Syndication?

THERE WILL BE COOKIES!

RSS Workshop tomorrow 4/28!
Alex will be presenting a workshop on RSS to the Circ group on Wed 4/28 at 3 pm in Lib 105. Please join us!

Here’s the workshop description:

Definition/Description of RSS
* Really simple syndication
* Standardized format for publishing frequently updated works

Uses of RSS
* News and Updates
* Notification
* Aggregation
* Abstraction

Benefits and advantages
* Standardizes news so it can be reviewed, filtered and reorganized and
* Tracks what new for a given context (blog, personal RSS Reader)

Tools/Services for RSS
* RSS reader applications (desktop vs web)
* RSS widgets and plugins (WordPress plugins)
* Personal News Aggregators (iGoogle, NetVibes…)

Time for Q and A

RSS Workshop 4/28 – save the date!

Alex will be presenting a workshop on RSS to the Circ group on Wed 4/28 at 3 pm in Lib 105. Please join us!