RSS and Choosing a Framework

Thanks for all the RSS resources in this week’s lecture! Especially helpful and useful was the RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators that Dr. Milman linked. This will also be useful for faculty members at my college that are struggling to understand RSS.

Erik provided some wonderful and useful ideas in his post and I am interested in exploring his ideas further since I’m looking for an elegant way to add news headlines to our college web site.

In playing around with this idea, a few months ago I managed to add headlines from my blog into my portfolio web site on this page; scroll down and look in lower right column. I used a service called Feedburner to do this. The feedburner service offers some other neat things, too. For example, I added the ability for a blog visitor to subscribe for email notification of new blog content. You can view it here in the right column under the category cloud. This is worthwhile for folks that don’t use an RSS reader and prefer to be notified by email of any new stuff. They are out there; believe me! Never mind that email is so 1996 and all. ;-)

For those that require an RSS feed for any given popular reader/application, feedburner also offers those little badges or chicklets, as they call them, for you to include on your site or blog. You probably saw them earlier on this link, right under the subscription link. You’ll notice bloglines, google, yahoo and a few others there. This is a nice offering for your visitors that may use one of those services – gives them an instant way to add your site to their RSS reader.

Feedburner offers a few other widgets for your blog that you might find useful. Here’s a screen shot of where you choose your widget and it generates the script for you. Then, just copy and paste into your web site.

This page explains a little more about the widgets available. Scroll down the page to see the table of explanations. Also note that these same widgets work for podcasts, as well.

With regard to one of this week’s activities, the examination of instructional modules and frameworks, I found this activity useful. Of particular interest was the section of “other sites” listed in that activity. I believe they appealed to me because my proposed IMU, at this point, doesn’t look like it will fit into any of the other frameworks listed. So these other sites seemed more instructional with Q & A, which is where I am at this point in the design process. I really liked the Ojalá que llueva café site; I thought that was clever and well-done. If we had had the internet and online instructional modules back when *I was in high-school (197X-198X), I can see being engaged in the activities presented here. Overall, I thought all the sites in the activity presented a wide-variety of frameworks that could be utilized in the design of an IMU. However, I can already see that the needs analysis will be very beneficial in helping me decide and narrow down my options with regard to framework!

*This qualifies as personal info! But here are a few photos of my cats, if you're into viewing cute furry animals. :)