Image courtesy of Looking for Fish tacos at ELI 2006, aka CogDog.

Well, I have finally gotten a free minute to get this all down, and get it down I will in hopes that I can drum up some help and support in working through a couple of the issues we’re having with FeedWordPress. So, here goes my state of the union address for FeedWordPress syndicating student work to class blogs on UMW Blogs….

First, FeedWordPress is the real deal, it is a solid interface, not too complicated, works out-of-the-box without cron plugins, and makes syndication a breeze. (D’Arcy overviews it beautifully here). Combine this simple syndication with all the tag and category feeds made available by Donncha’s Sitewide Tags plugin and you got the goods, EDUGLU-o-rama! As the great Mara Scanlon said after we demonstrated the power of FeedWordPress for her Ethics and Literature course today, “This is getting so much easier!” And that it is, she suffered through the days of BDP RSS and the untold issues with WP-Autoblog last year with character and fortitude, and her recognizing this afternoon that the syndication angle is coming together was a morale boost, for she doesn’t compliment ed tech stuff often or lightly.

So, I’m really excited. I can see some real potential and power here, we have over 15 classes using some version of FeedWordPress syndication, and for the most part it works seamlessly, enter one feed for a class tag, and the course blog populates itself, aggregating the student blog posts tagged accordingly. All is good….well, almost good.

Here are some of the issues we have run up against in the last week, in order of gravity:

1) For a few classes we are actually feeding the posts in with comments turned off and the permalink sending the reader back to the original blog. This works well when the feed is first syndicated in FeedWordPress. However, after that the subsequent posts that are pulled in link within the course blog, the permalink no longer send the reader back to the original post on the student’s blog. This sucks! This was a way to allow posts to aggregate in one place, but lead the rest of the class back to the student’s space, particularly useful if the class is subscribing to the course blog feed, for all the feeds will immediately take the reader to the student’s blog, a way to aggregate feeds from a variety of sites off one feed (a kind of tag specific OPML feed for class sites). So, this one is major, and it ain’t working as of now

2) This may be related to number one, but for several feeds that I click on that have been aggregated via FeedWordPress I get the following error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_insert_category() in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-content/mu-plugins/sitewide-tags.php on line 120

Making me think there may be a correlation between the FeedWordpress issues and the Sitewide Tags plugin. Anyone experience anything similar to this?

3) After FeedWordPress is activated and up and running, if you try and create a Link (just a plain old link in the Write–>Link tab) it actually creates a new, malformed feed in FeedWordPress. Bizarre. This doesn’t necessarily hurt anything that I know of, and I stress that I know of.

4) FeedWordPress doesn’t pull in tags from syndicated posts. Not a huge deal for us right now, but it would be useful.

5) The creation of categories from syndicated posts doesn’t work out-of-the-box. You have to actually update the rss-functions.php and rss.php files using the two they provide in the MagpieRSS Upgrade folder that comes with the FeedWordPres plugin (thanks for pointing this out, D’Arcy).

Ok, that’s it. I’m gonna post a modified version of this on the WPMu forums as well to see if anyone knows anything. The plugin author, Charles Johnson, seems to have been busy with other things and hasn’t upgraded his plugin for WP/Mu 2.6+, and frankly the guys built it out and supported it brilliantly. And once your plugin becomes popular, it must seem like as much as a burden as a service to constantly update and maintain it, I’ve seen it happen with a number of good syndication plugins which makes me nervous. We need to support these folks, and help them develop it out, or contribute accordingly.

So, there it is. FeedWordPress is about as close as we’ve come to realizing the syndication bus in major way, mad props to Andre Malan for turning me onto it again at Norther Voice this past February, and if anyone has any ideas for making it work a bit more consistently don’t be shy.

Oh yeah, one more thing.

The BDP RSS widget Andre Malan created for allowing people to add their feeds to a site via BDP RSS would make even more sense these days for FeedWordPress.

This post will detail how to create an aggregator site wherein people can simply add their feeds to a site and have their content automatically re-published. This example is specifically for WordPress and/or WordPress Multi-User. It depends upon three plugins, so download them ahead of time from the links below:

1) Oz Politics’s BDP RSS Aggregator

2) Andre Malan’s Add RSS extension widget for BDP RSS

3) Charles Johnson’s Feed WordPress plugin

Here’s how (and note that all the images below link to larger versions for your viewing pleasure):

Setting up BDP RSS

First you need to install, activate and setup the aggregator plugin BDP RSS. I will leave the installation and activation of this plugin to you, because it is the same as installing any other. However, the setup may benefit from some detailing. Once you have installed and activated BDP RSS, go to the Manage tab and find and click on the RSS Feeds subtab. You will then be taken to the space for managing feeds with this plugin. Which will look like the following:

This is pretty straighforward, you add feeds here, and poll them to pull all the newst conenct (which happens automatically based on the time you set). Andre Malan’s Add RSS Extension for BDP RSS actually automates this process from the front page of the blog, but more on this shortly.

If you scroll down a bit, you will be taken to the “Output formats” section of this page, this is where you control the output of the feeds you are aggregating, and this is the portion of this plugin that needs some explaining.

Once a number of feeds have been added, click on the edit button of the output formats (of which you can have several, but for this functionality you will only use one output format with the id 1). Once you click on the edit button you will be taken to a configuration page with a lot of options that can be overwhelming, so let’s take a look at them in some detail:

Here is where you an name the output format and decide how you want the aggregated feeds to be listed, whether chronologically, alphabetically, etc. Additionally, You have the choice to select only certain feeds, or to list all feeds, for truly automating this function so you don;t have to keep coming back to this page, I would just leave the radio box checked with the default of “List all sites.” After this you will see a series of other options below for how many post, how characters to display, in addition to other settings. The XHTML formatting for list presentation shown below is for custom formatting, but I never mess with this.

The XHTML tags to retain in this re-posting is something I do use, and you can see the options I select below:

After this, you get to a series of custom options for archiving, caching, or creating a feed of your aggregated feeds (an OPML feed). I will ignore the archiving and caching options, and focus on the “RSS feed from list” option you will need to create a feed of your feeds. Also, they don’t make this clear, but once you create an overarching feed, it will have the following url:

http://yourdomain.org/?bdprssfeed=1 (with the number being the ID of the Output format)

For example, the feed of all the aggregated posts on Reading Capital would be as follows:

http://readingcapital.org/?bdprssfeed=1

After you check the box for allowing an RSS feed to be provided for the list, then you can save your changes and you should be done with setting up BDP RSS.

Setting Up FeedWordPress

Now that we have set up BDP RSS, we can now install and activate FeedWordPress, which will actually syndicate the feeds that are being added into BDP RSS. The setup for this will actually take the feed for the list of feeds we created in BDP RSS, and simply republish these feeds within, for this example, Reading Capital. So, for our example, take http://readingcapital.org/?bdprssfeed=1 and go to the Syndicate tab in your WordPress backend.

You add the url for the feed (http://readingcapital.org/?bdprssfeed=1) in the “Add new syndicated site” text field, and click on the syndicate button, which will then test and preview the feed to make sure it works, after that click on the “Use this feed” button.

Once you have done this, you need to set up the publishing options for the feed under the Syndication–>Options tab. Below are the settings I am using, you have numerous choces, and you can choose what works for you, but I prefer to turn off comments on the aggregation site, and make the permalink link back to the original post on the author’s blog.

Once you have set these options and saved them, you need to go back to the main syndication page, check the radio box of your feed, and click on “Update Checked Links” –which is you follow my settings in the Options above will happen automatically from now on.

3) Allowing Users to Add their RSS feeds from the Front page

Finally, install Andre Malan Add RSS extension plugin for BDP RSS (follow his instructions for installation) and go to the design–>Widgets section of your backend, and drag the widget into the sidebar. After that, as people add their feed on the front page of your blog, it will automatically be inserted into the BDP RSS list of feeds, which i turn will be run through FeedWordPress and re-published on the blog. Genius? Yeah, it is, isn’t it! And it’s all Andre Malan, so kudos to him!

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photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Well, it took us over a year, and with several iterations along the way, but I think UMW Blogs will now be able to provide dead simple aggregation of posts from numerous, distributed blogs with very little work, but a little bit of money for the plugin extension ($50 to be exact). Henri Simeon’s MuTags plugin and the $50 extension we bought from him gave UMW Blogs a RSS feed for each and every site wide tag.

Once sitewide tags have an RSS feed, the whole problem of grabbing each student’s RSS feed, and making sure you have the right URIs becomes irrelevant. The only thing that needs to be done is that the class has to decide upon a unique tag for their posts. After that, any post a student wants to be fed into that course blog must be tagged appropriately. So, for example, if I am teaching a pirate class and I want students to tag posts in their blogs with “pirategroom” (no quotes), then all they have to do is tag the post correctly. On the course blog I just activate the FeedWordPress plugin and put in one very simple URI:

http://umwblogs.org/tag/pirategroom/rss

That’s it (you can see the test here). The only caveat being that this site wide tag feed only works for UMW Blogs (or your local WPMu installation). If students are using other services to host their own blogs then this solution won’t work. However, you can throw in a little BDP RSS coupled with Andre Malan’s Add Feed plugin which will provide a quick and elegant solution for solving this—read more about this here.

Wow, we are getting closer and closer, and while the MuTags RSS feeds is choking on images and video (annoying!), we are going to get that straight over the next month and have a full fledged, scalable solution for aggregating posts from numerous student blogs into one, central course blog with no overhead. Yeeeeeeees!!!

BTW: This is my first post on the bava using WPMu 1.5.1—so I can finally get used to   and document the new WordPress backend interface.

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So, in an attempt to galvanize my mania to its most chaotically productive for Faculty Academy 2008, I’ll go on with this e-portfolio madness, as promised. However, the comments on part 1 are already making me wonder whether this post shouldn’t be written by D’Arcy, Chris, Phaedral, or Cole (or perhaps all of them)?

That acknowledged, I want to particularly note Chris and Phaedral’s comments about the importance of each individual controlling the sequential nature of their portfolio, giving them full control over this nuanced space for extensive creativity, expression, and order. I couldn’t agree with either of them more, and hopefully some of what I suggest below will point in that direction, but by no means put to rest the challenges and demands of such important caveats, and one can only hope for meaningful serendipity.

Ok, no more backsliding, avanti! The examples below will be centered around the work we have been doing at UMW with WordPress Multi-User (much of what I discus below can surely be done with Drupal and Movable Type —and probably several other applications I don’t know about), but this is my blog and I ain’t going to talk about those hippie applications anymore, ya hear?

Good.

An Example of a blogfolio?

Robert Lynne, a graduating Art major at UMW, will be my example for this post. I hope he can forgive me constantly harassing him, but his blogfolio (to quote D’Arcy) is a model of at least one way you can imagine the portfolio logic working. Rob has used his blog for several classes, an Art History course, an Art Studio course, a Sculpture course, as well as a Poetry Workshop course. He has had his blog for the 2007/2008 academic year, and the space demonstrates some of the questions of creative control, sequence, and serendipity that I mentioned earlier in regards to Chris and Phaedral’s concerns.

In his blogfolio he chronicled his trip to NYC, helped shape a manifesto, blogged for classes, sang songs, and even had time to heckle yours truly. All of this was an on-going stream of ideas and thoughts that framed a process, being an art major he also had a lot of completed work to present to his audience, and this is where the use of pages on his blog became the space for what many might understand as a more traditional portfolio. He has a page dedicated to his paintings, sculptures, final thesis presentation, as well as a more focused about page. In these pages he controls the sequence, presentation, and obviously decides what goes in and what is left out. The space captures a fascinating part of both his creative process and experience throughout the year, but italso quickly became a space for him to represent the products of that process. He controls his space, he can delete my comments, delete his blog, or export the contents and take them somewhere else. In fact, there is no reason why he couldn’t have done all of this on Blogger or WordPress.com. That said, I think the major reason he started it (but it probably was not the logic that ultimately drove it) was the fact that he was asked to blog for at least three different courses this academic year. Not all of which were in his discipline. I think the major reason his work branched out beyond the classes was that there was an audience, the UMW culture encouraged it, and he found it useful (at least to some degree) to frame his work and experience.

The Name of the Game is Spam-like Aggregation

The reason why blogs can be understood as more powerful, dynamic, and complex portfolio system is because of their Houdini like RSS ability. It really all revolves around the syndication infrastructure which makes all the difference, it affords flexibility, dispels the myth of a monolithic system, and allow for the more complex levels of filtering of content I will outline below. But for a portfolio system to work (and I think I feel the term portfolio falling apart right about now but bear with me) it has to be more than that. It has to be a space where people post there ideas for class, react to topics more informally, add resources about various issues they are thinking through (course related or not), and frame the academic work that they are amassing through their career as learners more generally. This is not a technological issue at all, this is a cultural one, and we have begun to see the beginnings of this at UMW (Roblog being an excellent example), but it is by no means ubiquitous, and there is much, much work to be done in terms of fostering the community to think about these elements together in a more orchestrated fashion.

One of the things about blogs more generally that have made this cultural leap a bit easier is that they are excellent at pulling together all the various online spaces a person may occupy and they are inherently open. Both of which allow for updates from Twitter or Facebook; embedding videos from YouTube or images from Flickr; providing extensibility for a wide range of multimedia and traditional site design. All of which forms a platform that is inviting for its protean ability to incorporate various media and one’s distributed presence into one, simple space. This is key, and it is beautifully illustrated by an imagie engineered by Tom Woodward, which once I am able to annoy him enough to post it will be below as a big, beautiful illustration of this profound point, but geared to all you visual learners.
[ Imagine an image of an Octopus here with many loosely joined Web 2.0 tools ]

So, while Roblog is an excellent example, how does this make sense across a larger campus, and can you create both a culture and harness a simple enough technology process so that Roblog (and hundreds of other students) can easily blog for three or even six different courses during the year, while at the same keep it all on spaces they control yet share it as need be with the appropriate class. That is where the questions of filtering, aggregation, and a little bit of spam-blogging emerge.

Let me outline how this might at our current stage of development.

Thanks To Andre Malan’s widgets BDP RSS Add Feed and Add Sidebar User, it is getting simpler all the time, but we still have to make a couple of more jumps. I’ll outline them all below.

Leap of faith, I’m a professor and I ask my 25 student to get blogs (whether on UMW Blogs or elsewhere, it doesn’t matter) and once the do to come back to my course blog and add their RSS feeds. This is made easy with Andre’s Add Feed widget, for I can easily limit who adds a feed by the blogging community. So, once the student set up their space they can drop the feed in in the text field on the sidebar. Easy enough. But wha if they are using their blog for three diferent classes, a film hobby, and to document their Buffy the Vampire Slayer obsession? Well, then they could do one of two things, create a category for my class on their blog, lets call it bmoviemania, and if they are using WordPress (not sure how other blogging platforms handle category feeds) they can just add the RSS feed for that category like so:

http://myblog.com/category/bmoviemania/feed

Thereafter, everything they category as bmoviemania will be fed out to the course blog, keeping their Buffy posts and biology labs out of the b movie class blog (thanks goodness!). They could also do the same thing with a tag on wordpress, it would look like this:

http://myblog.com/tag/bmoviemania/feed

Now, we have a pretty straightforward method of taking these student blogs post for a specific course category or tag, and feeding them into an aggregated course blog. Now how does the aggregated course blog work? Well, it is much easier than it was a semester ago, but there is a little more automation that we need. (Warning: It gets a bit technical for the next few lines! But this information is not essential to the overall logic, so don’t let it throw you off, it is me calling or help ) The feed, once entered by the student, is immediately fed into the BDPRSS aggregator, this would need to be activated and the widget in the sidebar as soon as the professor creates this blog (any ideas Andre?).

Moreover, all the feeds that are fed into the BDP RSS aggregator would then have to be treated as an overall OPML which in turn is placed in the FeedWordPress plugin which actually taking all the posts from the respective student blogs and post them on this course blog (with the permalink pointing back to the students blog). Another automation needs to occur here, FeedWordPress needs to be automatically populated with the OPML feed from BDP RSS: http://bmoviecourse.com?bdprssfeed=1 The suffix will always be the same for this code, but the log domain, depending on the course will change.

So, save for two small bits of automation, we have a self-service aggregated course blog for aggregation, that allows all of the students responses, interaction, and posts to remain within their own space, while still capturing the logic of the course. A beautiful example of this is Gardner Campbell’s Rock/Soul Progressive course from Spring 2008. One additional benefit would be an automatically generated blogroll from the list of students who entered their feed, possibly drawn from the URLs in BDP RSS.

Sorry for the programmistan talk, I hope feedistan isn’t reading, but the larger point is that individuals now have their own space that they can grab the feed for, and even drill down and determine a feed for any given class with tags or categories, and then add it to a course aggregated blog.

But why all the talk about course blogs and aggregated such and such when this is about portfilios? Well, because I believe that this process is part and parcel of the archive/raw material that will ultimately populate this portolio. And as we saw with Roblog, the process is often just as relevant and important as the “product.” This is also where the importance of community and the push for students to have their own space and create within their own Personal Learning Environment (their I said it), but alow it to be fed and captured within an aggregated course blog navigates liminal space between the increasingly irrelevant LMSs, and the free-for-all hippie PLEs

Also, think about what just happened with the course blog for a second. What was outlined there is now the basis of a publishing framework for an individual’s portfolio that pulls from his/her blog archive of posts and class materials in a way that, like the course blog, they have the option to further tag or categorize the work in their personal archives that deal with all sorts of subjects, topics, experiences, and projects from their experience, and allow them to feed it into a site that reflects them in some way outside of the more conventional ideas of a blog (this would be available for UMW Bloggers and those who self-hosted—not free, hosted solutions like wp.com, Blogger, etc.). Now some might be saying but why? The blog is them? And Roblog is an excellent example of this, so I don’t necessarily disagree, yet the overarching archie blog may not be where they want to frame their work as a photographer, present lab work, field work, films, music, poetry, or business case study. The idea here is that anyone can choose how the fed out the relevant categories, that let’s say are tagged with portfolio, and these spaces become more elegant and malleable presentation spaces for for particalar elements of their work wherein they control the sequence, aestheitc, and in many ways the experience of the visitor.

In many ways the is the aggregation/syndication infrastructure brought down to the human scale. yet, if you have students adding feeds to course blogs, why couldn’t they do the same to directories, aggregated discipline channels, a Blogging platform hompage, or what have you. The fact that the syndication architecture is brought down to the atomic level of the individual, makes for the power of the site to scale more globally. More than that, the community will have a good sense of what it is they are doing and why!

I’ll end here because it’s three am, and a man’s gotta sleep, but sometime tomorrow look for part 3 of This ain’t yo mama’s e-portfolio

Featuring: Biology Lab portfolios at UMW & an experiment with an English course using portfolios for anonymous assessment? Who knew?

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I think the sir in this title should really be Andre Malan who recently created the Add to BDP RSS WordPress plugin, his first plugin for WordPress. This is functionality I have dreamed of for over a year now. In short, it is a plugin that adds a sidebar widget so that people can quickly and easily add their feeds to a BDP RSS-powered aggregation page.

Why am I so excited about it? Well, we have done a fair number of aggregated course blogs that bring numerous students posts into one space. BDP RSS has proven an excellent option for its ability to parse feeds cleanly, but adding feeds to the aggregator was heretofore only something an administrator or very brave professor could do. Well, that isn’t the case anymore, one more obstacle to progress destroyed by Brian Lamb’s student dream team.

So, in an effort to further explore how this plugin works on WPMu, I added it to the bava and would ask anyone who reads this post to add a feed to the sidebar form titled “Add RSS Feed.” It is simple, and you can see your results on the bavafeeds page.

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