Citadel of the Blogs The Inbox of the Internet (really)

Just a few quick notes about somethings I discovered about my blog recently.

First, the easy one: someone said wordpress didn’t let you embed videos in it. I have no idea why they said that; just plunk down the “embed” code from Youtube, for instance, and voila! video kills the radio star.

Second, I have started writing a bi-weekly column for the student newspaper at this university. Topics will relate to “information literacy”. To archive these, I wanted to create a separate page for them rather than just loosely through this blog. Creating a separate page was easy. But then I wanted the convenience of just blogging the post. So I wondered if there was a way to channel the feed of a category to another page. While this is a relatively simple feature for some bloggers, in my case it was fairly labour intensive.

I use Wordpress and I never toyed with the category feature before. But it turns out that you have to use permalinks to channel feeds in Wordpress. I think this is because the default categories use php in the URL with the question mark prompt. RSS feeds really don’t like question marks, apparently.

So I discovered two things:

I can use the category names via permalinks to channel a feed so long as I added [ /feed ] to the end of the URL (e.g. http://gravesnet.com/taxonomy/tags/japan/feed for the japan category)

But this didn’t solve my problem entirely. It would allow people to follow these categories in their reader. But how could I display this as a static page?

To solve this, this was my workaround:

1. turn on permalinks (basically, go to Options/Permalinks enter this in the “structure” field: [ /archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ ] and enter this in the “category base” field: [ /taxonomy/tags ])
2. create a newsletter at FeedBlitz
3. so long as I add [ /feed ] to the end of the permalink, feedblitz creates a newsletter of only this category
4. go to FeedBurner and use feedblitz’ RSS feed to activate feedburner’s headlines OR use the permalink with [ /feed ] at the end (both create RSS feeds so either works)
5. take code of this headlines feature and put it on my stable page

the bonus is that people can either view the page in their RSS readers or subscribe to an email newsletter via feedblitz. which is something I have now added to my main blog page. should’ve had it before, probably, but as I say I never got around to fiddling with this or categories.

voila! I now have a main blog where I will continue to post about whatever interests me. then as I create an article for the paper, I simply categorize it as “information literacy” and it will automatically be displayed on the separate page in headline format in reverse chronological order (aka, blog style, newest on top). that way, students who want to follow the tips but are not interested in the rest of my blog can simply subscribe to that feed alone.

believe it or not, this was the simplest and most elegant solution to my problem. thank you feedblitz/feedburner!

I should probably explain that adding headlines to a stable page was something I have wanted to do for two years now. instead of having the root url be my blog (gravesnet.com) I always wanted it to be gravesnet.com/blog or something and then just feed the headlines of the blog into the root page — sort of a “what’s new” section. but wordpress certainly never let me do this. and I was stumped until it occurred to me that I could use two separate services to achive this goal of mine.

believe it or not I have feedblitz to thank for this: they actually use feedburner to display their own blog headlines! brilliant. [check the credit under their “latest feedblitz headlines” section on FeedBlitz’ main page).