After Google Reader: Getting organized in Feedly

The transition into Feedly from Google Reader is seamless, and what you can do there is amazing! Once you have your feeds in Feedly, you can add them to new categories, and reorganize them into multiple categories.  All will backwash to Google Reader, till it goes belly up on the first of July:

We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. (Official Blog, A second spring of cleaning, 2013.03.13)

For example, in the screenshot below, there is a Language . . . feed in a topic grouping (Languages and Learning), as well as in another source grouping (Facebook). Likewise, there are social groupings, such as KGUW_13-14, new mash-ups for an instructional cohort, and Learning with Computers, connections from a series of professional development workshops.

It is also possible to rename feeds in Feedly displays. For example, in the Wikispaces (source) category feed  listing above, all five current items look the same. The feed names need to be trimmed back to the essential wiki titles, for ease of reading at a glance in Feedly displays.

[212 words]

Networked Student - YouTube (2008.11.26)

Networked Student - YouTube: Uploaded by Wendy Drexler on Nov 26, 2008

"The Networked Student was inspired by CCK08, a Connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes during fall 2008. It depicts an actual project completed by Wendy Drexler's high school students." 

(YouTube description, link added)

The Networked Student (Drexler, 2008)

'via Blog this'

Posts from pab's ning t'ing

Today's the last day I can say:

[I'm a member of pab's ning t'ing]

Free access to such Ning networking sites is phasing out as I type. As a matter of fact, I wonder how long the badge (gadget) that I've embedded above will last.

I've grabbed a couple of posts from My Blog on that site as keepsakes:

pab's ning t'ing

a microcosm in a nanosecond 

Tweaking RSS Feeds on Main Page

• Posted by pab on February 21, 2008 at 6:02pm

In order to show enough, but not too much, of the posts coming in through RSS feeds on the Main page, I have tweaked the settings on the various feeds:

1. Blogger blog feeds: Titles only - five per blog

The first couple of Blogger feeds, if not all of them, were coming through in full - with embedded videos and all the rest of the media dragging down page loading insufferably. So I trimmed them back to titles only. Then I increased the number of recent posts showing from three to five to show more a bit more content, and make it slightly easier to distinguish one blog feed from the next.

2. Edublogs and Vox blog feeds: Extended views - three per blog

Since RSS feeds from both of these types of blogs seem to limit themselves to several lines of text, I went ahead with the extended view option for all of them. However, I limited each feed display to the three most recent post, so as not to make it necessarily to scroll virtually endlessly to read down through the entire list of posts.

Arranging RSS Feeds on Main Page: Like Herding Cats?

• Posted by pab on February 21, 2008 at 5:00pm

Arranging RSS feeds in the Main page today has taken much more time here in Ning than it does on any page in Pageflakes. That is mainly because when you go to Manage - Features in Ning, you cannot see any content in the modular elements, or edit the titles on them to make them readily identifiable. Moreover, you cannot rearrange the elements directly in Ning page view like you can in Pageflakes.

The Main Page of pab's ning t'ing now contains nine RSS feeds, three from each of three educators in the Weblogging in Kumamoto (WinK) community. I've organized those nine feeds alphabetically: first by authors' family names (unlisted), then by blog titles. I reckon the list will stay in that order for a while, at least.

[retrieved 2010.08.20]

Quick Study of Blog Feed Stat's

When the ClustrMaps widget on the Writing Studio Blog started getting blotchy in locations other than Japan, I started wondering how all the blots came to be. Some, I knew, represented sources of comment spam that began showing up recently even though I've kept that blog out of Blogger listings (Settings: Basic: Add your blog to...: No!) since its inception. 


So today I took a look at FeedBurner Feed Stat[']s for both the blog headline feed and the blog post feed that I'd redirected through FeedBurner, respectively: 

• Headlines: February 25, 2007
• Posts: January 15, 2009

A difference discernible in spite of the disparate ages of the redirected feeds is in how the feeds get used. The Headlines go to FeedBurner Email subscriptions, and, although there also is a "Get Mailed: Posts" from FeedBurner gadget in the blog sidebar, too, the Posts, by and large, go into feed readers and aggregators – over the past seven to 30 days, mainly to Mozilla Compatible Agents (5-10), Google FeedCatcher (2-3), and PubSub (2 [unchanged]). 


Also over the past seven to thirty days, but for neither feed, have there been any hits (clicks on the feeds) from either Google Chrome or Internet Explorer browsers. Most hits have been from Firefox browsers; next most, from other Mozilla driven browsers.


The remainder of this post lists other findings as well as sources of this information, to which you may not have access (except in parallel locales relevant to your own FeedBurner feeds). 

The Writing Studio Blog: Headlines

Current

33 subscribers

Last Seven Days: Wednesday, March 31 – Tuesday, April 06

28 subscribers (on average)

"This number provides a general understanding of the size of your subscriber base over a time period" (FeedBurner Help, What is a Subscriber? How does FeedBurner tally them? How does it look?).

Last 30 Days: Monday, March 08 – Tuesday, April 06

28 subscribers (on average)

• including 27 email subscriptions

All Time: Sunday, February 25, 2007 – Tuesday, April 6, 2010

• since adding Post Feed Redirect URL to blog Site Feed settings
• jumped from two to almost 30 in April 2008

18 subscribers (on average)

• 18 email subscriptions

__________
Source: The Writing Studio Blog: Headlines – Analyze (Google FeedBurner)

The Writing Studio Blog: Posts

Current

55 subscribers

• more than doubles average for Last Seven Days (below)
• almost triples average for Last 30 Days (below)

Last Seven Days: Wednesday, March 31 – Tuesday, April 06

24 subscribers (on average)

• including one email subscription

1 reach (on average)

"At any given time, you can expect that a certain percentage of this subscriber base is actively engaging with your content and this “Reach” measurement provides this additional insight." (FeedBurner Help, What is Reach?, What does it tell you?).

Last 30 Days: Monday, March 08 – Tuesday, April 06

19 subscribers (on average)

• including one email subscription

1 reach (on average) 

All Time: Friday, January 15, 2010 – Tuesday, April 6, 2010

• since adding Post Feed Redirect URL to blog Site Feed settings

16 subscribers (on average) 

• zero email subscriptions

0 reach (on average) 

__________
Source: The Writing Studio Blog: Posts – Analyze (Google FeedBurner)

Pageflakes for Educators

Check out this SlideShare presentation by Gladys Baya, with an embedded YouTube video (below). It introduces RSS feeds and a tool for aggregating them, Pageflakes.

Vance Stevens, who moderated an Elluminate Live! session for a TESOL workshop in which Gladys gave the presentation, has made a recording of the session available with a TinyURL. Thanks, Vance!

Thanks, too, to Gladys for publicizing this all in a blog post, Pageflakes for Educators (2009.02.10), in which she also notes recent concerns regarding the stability and viability of Pageflakes.

Pageflakes4 Educators

View more presentations from Gladys Baya. (tags: webheads presentations)

Spring into Summer

At long last, I've got Spring Widgets working again. The exasperation was unbearable. It has taken almost a year to get to where I almost was last spring. That is, to:

• Display more than one feed in one widget, if any at all, and
• Get one logo to display at the head of more than one feed in the widget.

Work-arounds among Feedburner, SpringWidgets, Firefox, and Safari finally succeeded! Though I'm not sure I can replicate, or even remember the steps, an RSS Reader near the top of the sidebar now displays feeds from two Edublogs:

1. The Language Learner Development Project Blog (my newest), and
   
2. The Language Teacher Development Project Blog (oldest, second only to pab's potpourri).

Saving the logo separately for each feed in Feedburner seemed to do the trick for the display, but had to be done for both before getting the widget code for either blog from Spring Widgets. The bar divider between SpringWidget blog feeds worked in Safari, today. I should have tried that instead of Firefox months ago, when I first encounter scripting errors while trying to retrieve widget code through Firefox.

Yet just now, drafting this post in Safari, I was unable to use standard copy and paste keyboard commands. So I saved this post there, opened it again here in Firefox, et voilà!

Notes on Feevy

Feevy is a free online service for collecting and recasting RSS feeds in sleek, pre-formatted widgets (three+ styles) that I learned about in the Blogging for Educators workshop (TESOL EVO, 2008). I've tried it out in the sidebar, and in a post on this blog, with both a feed from a separate blog, and a comment feed from this blog. [I've removed the experimental post, and replaced the experimental sidebar widget already.]

One upside of Feevy is, like in PageFlakes, you don't need to know where to find or how to construct an RSS feed for a blog or website. You can simply copy the URL of the site you want to add to your widget, and paste the URL into the Feevy site, which creates the widget code for you, either from URLs (one at a time) or from OPML input (in batches). The more sites you add to your Feevy collection, the more content is likely to bubble up through the widget itself. Another upside is you can put Feevy widget code almost anywhere on your blog or site, or in multiple locations.

Though I had already written, "...you can only have one Feevy widget...," [that was wrong;] there are ways you can trick up different displays by tagging the blogs you add or have added to your Feevy collection, and tweaking the appearance of the widget. For details, please check the FAQ (item 2.5, Can I tag the blogs in my feevy for... different feevies? 2008.03.04) [or compare the two widgets currently in the sidebar {upper and lower right, 2008.03.05}].

Quick Captures from Eduspaces

With free services, I gather it's better not to keep all of your eggs in one basket. Now that I've decided to opt out of forced migration from Eduspaces.net to EducatorsCentral.org (a projected TakingITGlobal service), and thanks to limited investment in Eduspaces over the past couple of years, it has been relatively easy to self-migrate those bits of content and resources that I had concentrated in Eduspaces to other free services, before my Eduspaces account gets deleted:

1. Profile information (c. 2006):
   
• Self-description,
• Interests, and
  
• Skills; and
  
2. RSS feeds (5) to:
• Eduspaces communities (3):
1. Blogs, wikis, and social software for teaching and learning,
2. Communication and Collaboration Online, and
   
3. eportfolios;
• CiteULike: Tag socialsoftware
• Wordpress blog: EdTechPost
  

Proceeding in a small pieces loosely linked fashion, I have updated and relocated the RSS feeds described above. They are now in a temporary PageFlakes page (currently private),

The Eduspaces community links (above), also updated, will probably break down by the second week of March 2008, due to the service migration detailed in a previous post (Any Elgg users out there?, 2008.02.14). The same goes for the hot-linked keywords listed under interests and skills in the profile information that I've cut and pasted in below (Who am I...).

It may be possible to update those links once the actual migration from eduspaces.net to educatorcentral.org occurs, by replacing all of the domain names in the link URLs. However, I plan not to rebuild dozens more links - at least not anytime soon.

Who am I?

An educator and a learner, a parent and a child, a colleague and a friend.

Interests

collaboration, community, culture, development, education, language, learning, moodle, open source, portfolios, reflection, software, teaching, technology, tools

Main Skills

collaboration, communication, facilitation, learning, reflection, teaching

Vox Privacy Zones & Blended Learning

This illustration was originally for a private group on Vox that colleagues and I use to conduct and collect discussions related to our teaching, where I wrote "This graphic represents four out of five privacy levels that Vox affords. The fifth level, zero of four if you will, is public" (personal correspondence, October 14, 2007). As you might guess, we are all quite keen on the fine-grained privacy controls that Vox provides on every post. We are interested as educators in adopting and adapting or subverting those privacy controls for use in teaching situations.

I have a bit over a month to decide whether to take the leap to teaching with Vox in a new class starting in April. However, in face-to-face discussion last month (January 2008), a colleague who had introduced students to Vox last year suggested that the friends and neighbors display features, along with automated recent post and comment feeds for groups, could quickly outgrow both individual and group blog display spaces.

Only so many (three to five?) recent contributions will remain visible in automated Vox feeds. So, while perhaps suitable for groups of up to a dozen members, for classes any larger than that, aggregating everyone's individual contributions in a single group might not work so well. Especially in the space of class meetings (blended face-to-face & online learning), fresh comments and posts from group members would quickly disappear from view.

Do any of you have experience using Vox blogs in blended learning environments, or any thoughts on trade-offs between community building and learner privacy? If so, I'd love to hear them.

Getting ready for RSS

My mailboxes get filled by discussion board and mailing list messages faster than I can read them. Yesterday, I hastily reviewed and disposed of hundreds and hundreds of messages, in just two prefiltered mailboxes, culling only a few which struck my fancy. Even though I'd searched for, and previewed items in one of those mailboxes containing my favorite term, "collaborati," and had sorted messages in the other mailbox for posts by members whom I know and respect to preview, on threads that had already caught my interest; it was a long, tiring, unsatisfying, and largely unproductive process

So I'm planning to start making use of RSS feeds and aggregation technology to create several focused collections of collections of related source materials that I enjoy reading, and find useful (or potentially so) in my work. One collection will combine SCoPE scheduled seminar feeds, with Online Facilitation mailing list posts that usually go into the two mailboxes that I emptied yesterday.

http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/rss/file.php/12/177/forum/132/rss.xml
http://rss.groups.yahoo.com/group/onlinefacilitation/rss

The question is, where and how to put these together, for my own ease of reading and uptake. Elgg..., Safari...? Hmm. Perhaps that depends on where I will be most likely to view and digest them in a deliberate and timely fashion.

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