Day: February 4, 2007

Let your (Post) feed subscribers see a comments count

If a visitor subscribes to the main RSS feed from an Exc-el WPMU blog, they’ll see the recent Posts, but not the corresponding Comments. To see if there are any comments on a given Post, they’ve got these choices:

  • subscribe to the Comments feed, and use that by:
    • going to the comments feed in their aggregator, then
    • browsing through the list of comments looking for matching titles
  • visit the blog itself, and look at the comments count there
  • click the Comments link for each post to actively look for Comments on a given Post

Any of these requires a bit of clicking around. Wouldn’t it be good to avoid that? Continue reading Let your (Post) feed subscribers see a comments count

firstRSS: In-Post RSS Aggregator

One of the biggest hurdles we’ve got in the edublogging community is bridging the RSS chasm.

  • If you’re an edublogger, chance are you’ve got at least a basic idea of what it’s all about. You’ll probably use an RSS reader, or aggregator, such as Bloglines, to keep track of the blogs you read. You maybe even use an RSS feed or two to provide some content for your blog, such as news headlines.
  • For most people in schools, though, RSS is just another bit of jargon. The potential benefits of RSS tools in education can’t be obtained. And because – if you’ll pardon the Rumsfeld-ism – they don’t know they don’t know it, let alone what the benefits might be, there’s no demand for training…

What has to happen for people to “get it”? In my experience, demonstrating a feed aggregator is a key step. I usually use Bloglines for this, as it has a good user interface. But if you want to try to explain RSS in your blog, as Tess does here, you’re at a disadvantage – you can’t so easily show a live feed in the context of your writing.

But what if you could put a little RSS feed reader right inside your blog post? Continue reading firstRSS: In-Post RSS Aggregator