tags
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.
So….so so so so so so, it’s time for a little walk down WPMu history lane. Last year at this time I was desparately scrambling for a way to have sitewide tags for UMW Blogs. I found the solution in Dr. Mike’s hack shared on the WordPress forums here, but it was a kind of a mess even then. Yet, the concept was brilliant, a separate site that allows you to archive, search, and create a tag cloud for categories through a good ol’ spamming plugin. —DIY ingenuity at work given the limitations of WPMu at the time. The set up ran on a separate single install of WordPress that was pulling in the sitwewide feed from WPMu (thanks to It Damager –who has disappeared along with his Sitwewide feed plugin) and running it through the outdated Wp-Autoblog plugin, as well as a plugin for re-directing the permalink to the original blog it was fed in from (a process I detailed here). Moreover, once I got this hacked concept straight in my head and installed it, the WP-Autoblog plugin and the Sitewide feed plugin had to be further modified to work. Add to that the fact that when I updated UMW Blogs from 1.2.x to 1.3.3 the category were no longer pulled into the separate WP site properly, effectively breaking the tag cloud. Making the whole thing at least a partial bust right around February. In short, it was an extremely smart hack on Dr. Mike’s part, but in the long run it became more of a nightmare than an asset.
So, as soon as I saw the MuTags plugin for WPMu sitewide tags from Mr. Henry I jumped on that, and made that the default tag cloud for UMW Blogs, and used Dr. Mike’s hack as an archive for posts throughout the environment (sans categories). But Mr. Henry’s MuTags had two problems: it had no sitewide feed for each tag, and it couldn’t incorporate categories into the tag cloud. Moreover, when we bought the $50 extension for the plugin which allowed feeds for each tag, I found the feeds to be pretty poorly parsed and ugly But I was hopeful enough to blog it, and when Stephen Downes took issue with our paying $50 bucks for this functionality I wore all black for weeks and couldn’t sleep at night (this was before he discovered and broadcasted the beauty that is EDUPUNK —welcome back Stephen 
).
So, that kind of brings us up to date, and it is also when a new era begins for WPMu. Because all the functionality I needed at least three plugins for, a separate WordPress installation, a brain surgeon, and a hammer to make work have all been bundled into one little WPMu plugin developed and shared by the inimitable Donncha: Sitewide Tags Pages for WPMu. This plugin gives you all the functionality that the original hack did, namely a searchable archive of posts and sitewide categories with feeds, but adds a few as well such as sitewide tags (which are really tags not categories called tags –we have figured out the difference, right?) and sitewide feeds for tags, a built-in “spamming tool” that just republishes the post from throughout the environment onto one blog in your WPMu environment at the URL http://tags.yourblog.com. And more than that, the permalink points to the original blog and the author is immediately populated in the tags blog making the whole process seamless and clean. Not to mention the fact that given it is a blog within your WPMu environment you don’t have the overhead of a separate install with outdated versioning because you don;t want to surrender the archiving functionality all together.
So, how to use this? First off, keep in mind Donncha has made it backward compatible for older versions of WPMu, but I would recommend using it on 2.6 only, for it seems there are still some glitches on older versions (at least WPMu 1.3.3). Here is how I am thinking about using it on UMW Blogs. As a sitewide category/tag cloud with feeds galore, which will actually be useful for syndicating class content as I talked about in the e-portfolios post here—not to mention a few other ways of thinking about course blog -but more on that soon. And given all the posts with both their tags and categories are in one blog, I can actually use Simple Tags to display the tag cloud, make categories show up as tags, and get a consistent feed with some related tags and posts contextual goodness. Laying Simple Tags over this blog and playing with it will make all the difference in my opinion. I have started this process as an experiment here.
Moreover, we can starting thinking creatively about archiving the posts on UMW Blogs with little or no hassle. We could actually archive a whole semesters worth of posts, or year’s, by simply exporting the XML file for the tags blog, or dumping the database. In effect, starting fresh every semester, while creating a separate space for the large, searchable archive of all the posts in UMW Blogs. This plugin has the potential to solve so many problems all in one fell swoop, I’m excited about it, and will be keep you updated with the process as UMW Blogs makes the transition to WPMu 2.6.
P.S>–After just checking my sandbox version linked to above, it seems like this plugin also pulls in pages from around the environment, which is fascinating. And I will have to think about the implications of this, i I am, indeed, correct.
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!
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.
If you haven’t tried out the Simple Tags plugin yet, I promise you it will never be too soon. This plugin is extremely powerful, and strikes me more as a full blown application within WP than a simple extension of WordPress. I haven’t even begun to play with all the features it offers, but here are a number I have noticed already:
- Customizable Tag Cloud within pages, posts, and the sidebar
- Customized list of related posts based on tags
- Customized list of related tags
- Auto link feature for tags which will search posts and automatically “discover” tags
- Suggested tags based on both external and internal database comparison
- Display tags in RSS feeds
- Embedded tags
- Meta tags in header for search engines optimization
This plugin makes about three or four others I use redundant, and more than that it works just as well in WPMu, and has a nice interface for management complete with widgets and the whole nine yards. I hope Simple Tags marks the the future of WP plugins, for this is a very powerful tool that brings the functionality, ease, and possibilities of tagging within WordPress to the next level. A must have in my opinion.
There has been a bit of excitement about the possibilities for pushing the uses of RSS towards a mythical eduglu as of late. Brian posted about it here and got some great feedback, soon after D’Arcy Norman and Bill Fitzgerald ramped up their work with Drupal. Then there was David’ Wileys re-publishing of his course on WordPress.com, and Brian (again) frames the implications beautifully, and then Stephen Downes uses this example to point towards Tony Hirst’s Disaggregation of MIT OCW. In short, an amazing distributed thread to follow.
So while I was looking at Tony Hirst’s work with MIT’s Open CourseWare, he must have been leaving a comment pointing to a series of feeds on the Open Learn OER site. Additionally, he suggested that there isn’t any reason why these feeds couldn’t be pulled into a blog rather neatly. And you know what, he couldn’t have been more right!
I gave it a shot on a WordPress Multi-User installation I keep around for just these sorts of things. I pulled the Open University courses feeds into individual blogs using Wp-o-Matic, a tried and true spamblogging plugin. And I am pretty excited by the results. (As an aside, I find great pleasure in re-purposing the wicked tools of spammers to make re-publishing open educational resources that much easier.)
The first course from the OpenLearn site I republished was titled Goya. I chose this one for two reasons: a) I wanted to learn more about Goya, and b) it had a number of images and videos associated with it and I wanted to see how they would work. As a result, I now know more about Goya & the images and videos pulled into the site beautifully, very impressive XML! The first time I pulled this course the Introduction and background posts balked, this didn’t happen the second time I tested it however.
Compare the re-published blog site above (click on the image to see it) with the original course in the OpenLearn OER here.
Moreover, each of the course sections was in the proper logical order, meaning that the topmost post on the blog was the introduction, next the background, etc. This fortunate happenstance made reproducing the course outline on the sidebar of the blog simple. I just included the recent posts widget and re-titled it Unit Outline. After that, I had an entire course republished in my WPMu account within minutes.
As for the other two courses I tested (Hume and Word and image), they work perfectly save for a few stray a tags on the Word and image site. Compare the original Hume course on the OpenLearn site with the re-published blog site here. Do the same for the original Word and image course and the republished one here.
This was a pretty amazing experiment for me because it illustrates just how much I learn from reading blogs on a daily basis. Ideas happen in a series of relations, and I so thoroughly enjoy taking other people’s genius and testing it out. When I saw the Goya class get pulled in successfully in just over a minute, I started to realize just how powerful these open resources can be once they are freed from their repositories. What is stopping K-12s and universities from setting up WPMu installations (or Drupal, or what have you) and pulling these amazing resources in? Or even pushing them out themselves? Another question that needs to be asked is how many of the other open resources out there have the stellar RSS feeds these OpenLearn OERs do?
I can’t answer these questions, but I will venture a hunch about the first two I asked: once teachers and students begin to realize the unparalled ease and immense utility they get from having instant access to re-purposed open educational resources, it may very well have a deep impact on current habits of publishing all their hard-earned work within a blackbox.
As an afterthought, I tried this same experiment in WordPress.com, but unfortunately that service only allows you to import specific RSS feeds from other services like Moveable Type, Blogger, etc. So, in the end, a spammer shall lead the way
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I’ve been monkeying with a Drupal site that looks like it could fulfill most (even all?) of the mythical Eduglu concept - a website that aggregates all feeds published by students in a class/department/institution, and helps contextualize them in the various groups/cohorts/courses each student participates in. It’s getting really close - it can currently suck in all kinds of feeds, auto-tagging items, and even lets students create their own groups and associate feeds with them. There are issues, to be sure, mostly with respect to honouring the original tags in the aggregated items, and with taking advantage of the social rating system added to the website, but it’s so close I can taste it.
At the moment, there are almost 1200 items aggregated from feeds published by 19 users. It’s only been running for a week, so that’s not a bad start…
One added bonus of using Drupal for this, is that I can drop the Tagadelic module into place to generate a tag cloud representing all aggregated items’ tags. Here’s the tag cloud from the current prototype site:
Just seeing that aggregate cloud makes me smile. I’ll have to work on things like adding a group-only tag cloud, and maybe a tag with date parameters (which could be REALLY useful to build a movie displaying the shifts in tag weights over the course of a semester or year…)
As an aside, I’m pretty sure that this is the first post that I’ve added to all of the main categories of my blog: General, Work, and Fun. I’m pretty sure there’s something to that…
The State of the Union Tag Cloud post by Jim Coe over at Bionic Teaching speaks for itself:
These terms (they bigger they are the more they were used) say a lot about the rhetorical tenor of our leaders and the fact that rabid nationalism, war-mongering, and unchecked aggression are still quite popular in Washington. Moreover, it also suggests the power of a cloud like this to distill keywords, concepts, or subjects to give folks who want various access points to a text (or texts) different ways at it. Though this may be a bad example, for I can’t see too many differing perspectives in this cloud.
Those Fear 2.0 “Dream Team” bloghers must have been on to something!
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Here is a cool little thing I discovered recently, and please forgive me if it is already common knowledge. There is a cool little hack for getting RSS feeds for tags on YouTube. It goes like this:
http://youtube.com/rss/tag/randomtag.rss (where randomtag is the tag you want to aggregate)
Here are two examples. Andy Rush has but together some very cool screencasts for UMW Blogs, and they are tagged umwblogs, so if I include http://youtube.com/rss/tag/umwblogs.rss in some kind of an rss reader or aggregator you get the following:
YouTube :: Tag // umwblogs » Install Flickr Photo Gallery Plugin in UMWBlogs
Install Flickr Photo Gallery Plugin in UMWBlogs
Author: rushaw Keywords: UMW UMWBlogs flickr plugin Added: January 17, 2008
[Link]
YouTube :: Tag // umwblogs » Change the Password for Your UMWBlog
Change the Password for Your UMWBlog
Author: rushaw Keywords: UMW UMWBlogs password Added: January 17, 2008
[Link]
YouTube :: Tag // umwblogs » UMW Blogs Sign-Up Video
Andy Rush takes you through the sign-up procedure for UMW Blogs.
Author: jimgroom Keywords: umwblogs umw blogs screencast Added: January 15, 2008
[Link]
Username as a Tag
What’s more, if you want to aggregate by a user, you can just subsititute their username, which is treated as a tag. For examples, http://youtube.com/rss/tag/jimgroom.rss will bring the latest videos from my account.
YouTube :: Tag // jimgroom » UMW Blogs Sign-Up Video
Andy Rush takes you through the sign-up procedure for UMW Blogs.
Author: jimgroom Keywords: umwblogs umw blogs screencast Added: January 15, 2008
[Link]
YouTube :: Tag // jimgroom » Cronenberg's Scanners
The scene when Cameron Vale (Stepehn Lack) uses a phone booth and his telekinesis to hack the computer system. Remarkable because it was the first time I was the idea of the internet imagined on film (probably not the first time this happened, but the first I remember). Often WarGames gets all the love, but that comes two years later. …
[Link]
YouTube :: Tag // jimgroom » Test
Test
Author: jimgroom Keywords: Test thea435 Added: January 11, 2008
[Link]
YouTube :: Tag // jimgroom » Morellotube
you know what it is!
Author: jimgroom Keywords: testt thea435 Added: January 11, 2008
[Link]
YouTube :: Tag // jimgroom » Airplane!: Joey, have you ever seen a grown man naked?
Some of the best lines ever captured on film!
Author: jimgroom Keywords: airplane! humor fun Added: December 16, 2007
[Link]
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I discovered two cool things today that have to do with WPMu and tags.
First, that WPMu 1.3 comes with a stock widget for a tag cloud that doesn’t require a plugin or anything. How did I discover this? Well, UMW History professor Sue Fernsebner had it in the sidebar of the class blog for her Cultural History of Late 20th c. China seminar (which also has possibly the coolest header image I have yet to see on a blog). So, if you are running WPMu 1.3, look for the Tag Cloud widget, and drag it to your sidebar and behold the wonder of tagging without using categories.
Second, I found a solid plugin on wpmudev.org called MuTags. This is a simple solution for tags on WPMu, and what I particuarly like about it is that it gives you the option to create a tag cloud of all the existing tags as well as the existing categories — which is very cool if you have been using categories as tags as UMW Blogs has for the last semester.
I really think that tags add that extra functionality for aggregation across classes for student blogs that make the whole portfolio/aggregation idea that much simpler. A larger post in and of itself, but I’ll end this one by saying that the possibilities for tags in WPMu 1.3 has some amazing potential.
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