scotedublogs aggregation

What is scotedublogs

scotedublogs — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 17:29:01 +0000

Andrew Brown’s site whereisab? |: the digital home of andrew brown has had an upgrade. There are lots of interesting new sections. The most exciting for me is the Most Asked Questions, which is accessible from the left side of the homepage.
Beautiful wee screencasts explaining many aspects of blogs, rss and more, the one that had me most excited was What is scotedublogs.
Of course I read about Andrew’s changes on ScotEduBlogs.

Layout of ScotEdublogs

scotedublogs — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 23:19:00 +0000

I am mocking up the layout:
mockup, please feel free to give suggestions and advice, either here or over on the SEB developmlent group.

Using ScotEduBlogs Part 1

scotedublogs — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 20:59:39 +0000

On the simplest level just visit the home page ScotEduBlogs News and read the more recent posts by Scots Educators. This will save you a lot of time if you visit a lot of Scots Edu Blogs.

Or you can subscribe to the front page RSS Feed with your feed reader. You can use an online feed reader like Bloglines or an offline one such as Vienna (mac, search google or read some blogs to find more RSS readers.)

The next stage would be to read a feed of a particular set of blogs, on the Blogs page you would click on tags until you had a list you were interested in, for example primary, teachers and blogging. You can then subscribe to the RSS feed linked. Again this will keep you up-to-date with many blogs without having to visit them all .

Eventually there will be screencast to show how to create feeds going into more detail than above.

RSS

scotedublogs — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 22:36:55 +0000

RSS is central to ScotEduBlogs.org.uk which both feed off RSS and provides it.

According to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol) RSS is defined as:

RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by news websites and weblogs. They are used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel.

As far as blogging is concerned you can think of RSS as an alternative ‘view’ of your blog organized in a standard way. This standard organization means that the RSS file ( feed) can be used and mixed by a variety of applications.

An RSS reader such as Bloglines can automatically collect and display rss feeds from many different blogs saving you a lot of time and sparing one the effort of visiting blogs that have not been updated.

You can display an rss feed from a blog (or collection of blogs via ScotEduBlogs.org.uk or some such service) on another web page by a variety of means. For example: The sidebar here.

RSS is explored in many places but there a couple of intersting post from the Scots Edu blogs:
edublogs: The “glue” of blogging conversations: RSS
Blogging for Beginners – Understanding the Glue at Jonesieblog

This is the start of a definition/help text for ScotEduBlogs.org.uk please add comments to help improve it.

The sidebar

scotedublogs — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 23:24:14 +0000

The sidebar on this blog shows one of the simplest ways to use ScotEduBlogs.org.uk.
the ScotEduBlogs – Latest Posts bits uses the wordpress rss widget to display the latests posts aggregated by ScotEduBlogs.org.uk.
You could use one of the feeds created by filtering the blogs on the site and, say, list the latests posts from all primary, pupil blogs, or secondary maths teachers. A lot of useful possibilities.
A little further down I am using the same widget to display the Latest on the SEB development group by using the rss feed from the group, if you are not a coder you can just look at the ones without trunk in the title;-)
Adding the rss widget to the sidebar is a snip in wordpress. The widgets are accessable from the Sidebar Widgets subtab of the Presentation tab in the admin section. This needs a widget ready theme.

A little more on purpose

scotedublogs — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 18:44:20 +0000

I hope this blog will produce at least the following:

Discussion of the purpose of the ScotEduBlogs.org.uk
Discussion of features that the ScotEduBlogs.org.uk site will have in a no technical way.
Production and refining of some of the documentation for the site. Explanations of such things as RSS, OPML, Aggregators and even blogs.
Production and refining of help in using the site, how tos: using the site, producing feeds and opml files etc

The blog is at the moment produced by John but is open to comments from anyone and if anyone else wants to join as an Editor please get in touch.

Welcome

scotedublogs — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 21:33:54 +0000

This blog is for the discussion of the development of ScotEdublogs.org.uk.
It is hoped that this will help non-coders like myself to follow and add to the development of the site.
An introduction to the project is no on the scotedublogs on the Scots Edu Blogs Aggregation Project page. More will follow here. Feel free to add a comment here or edit the wiki.

Discussion of a more technical nature is going on at scotedublogs_devel google group where you can join in.
Interesting blog posts about the project so far are Scotedublogs – A New Hub for Scottish Educational Blogs on Robert’s blog and edublogs: Wherefor the wiki in ScotEduBlogs? on Ewans. Lots of comments and food for though on both.