Keeping it Really Simple in Schools
Another first today as I set up my first teacher with a Bloglines account to monitor his student sites. He’s awestruck…seriously. He promised he would spread the word, which I really think is exactly what I need here now. I’m convinced that when enough people see this in operation, we’ll be making sites like mad.
And we are already…the server is running 86 sites right now, about two-thirds of which have been created since the first of the school year. And I know of at least two more classes that are going to come online next week. As long as nothing breaks…
This morning on the ride in I came close to getting my brain around an idea that’s been stewing about making RSS easier to setup and access. I need to find a way to do a local Bloglines… What if I created an RSS page where XML links were automatically added when sites were created on the server. It would include a description of what the site was about. Staff or students or even parents could go that list, check the boxes they wanted to aggregate and somehow they’d have their own Bloglines type page created where they could track the content. I know I could get close to this in Manila, but I don’t necessarily want them to have to have a Web log of their own.
Works into this post by Paolo Valdemarin on Intranet aggregators. (Sometimes it really scares me when things seem to connect like this.) Here’s what he says:
The output of the aggregator should be both html that people can browse with their browser and more feeds which could end up in personal aggregators or funneled in other applications. Centralized aggregators should not necessarily mean that every user has to read all feeds. There should be both the kind of personalization allowed by personal aggregators (deciding which feeds to subscribe to) but also added value services that would allow users to discover additional sources of information and anyway give different relevance to different kind of information snippets that are displayed on the page.
That’s exactly what I’m thinking too. Now where do we find this????
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Generating the summary page of what weblogs exist on your system should be easy enough. Actually, I’m not sure about Manila, but I know that Movable Type is hackable enough to allow that. At worst, you would write a custom cgi app that would scan through the database and generate the blog index.
Are you thinking that the parents and students would have to log in to view their local [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “adrSiteRootTable” hasn’t been defined.]
? If so, I think it would be much easier to have them set up accounts at the real bloglines. If they don’t log in, I don’t see a good way to make sure they see the same feeds every time.
Thanks, Tim…logging into the real Bloglines is not a horrible solution, but it would involve cutting and pasting the xml feeds into the subscribe box…unless of course I could get Bloglines to create a school specific page from which parents and teachers could choose…hmmm. I wonder how hard it would be for them to set that up and then let me update the feeds…anyone at Bloglines reading????
My ears were burning.
Can you give me some more information? Are you looking just to share your feeds with others? Because you can do that now by editing your profile. Or were you looking to provide a specialized list of sites from which people could subscribe to? Or something else? I’m sure whatever it is, we can figure something out. Send me an email with some more details, and I’ll see what I can do. Thanks!
How about something connected with the Bloglines “Blog Directory”? In addition to the listing of individual blog sites, what if you had a list of of organizations and all the blogs they host? I don’t know RSS that well yet, but what if the organization published a listing of their blogs via RSS and the bloglines subscribed to that feed and used it to display the blogs at bloglines with an easy way to subscribe?
To follow up, I wonder if something could be done similar to the XML-RPC API at syndic8? See http://www.syndic8.com/services.php for more info.