Last week I talked about how I connect my students’ blogs to each of my course websites by exporting an HTML clip from Inoreader. Today I want to share another way to create a network of blogs: syndicating blog posts. There are different ways of doing this, and different reasons, but here is how I have done this in the past before I knew about Inoreader and its export features. If for some reason you need an alternative, here’s a peek in my old tool box!

• Scenario: Course Announcements
  • Solution 1: a plugin
  • Solution 2: RSS block
• Comparing FeedWordpress, the RSS block, and Inoreader

Scenario: Course announcements

When we went suddenly remote in March 2020 (courtesy of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic), I wanted to use blog posts as daily course announcements for my students, to help them keep track of assignments, and to send them encouragement. I felt that would be better than emails: my notes about assignments and course content would get lost amid a constant barrage of emails. And we all already know how hard it is to keep an email inbox organized. (Mine is looking pretty spiffy, courtesy of stackmethod.com, which I highly recommend.)

Our LMS did not allow for a single announcement to be sent to all three courses at once, and I’d be darned if I would add more to my plate by writing three separate ones even if I could copy-paste them. Instead, I felt the best solution for my communication needs was a single blog post with the list of things to do that day for each of the courses. I made sure to keep the format simple and predictable:

• Information to all students from me or the college at the top, including the odd uplifting or fun link or image.
• Next, information for each course in the same order (by course number: HST107, HST259, HST267)

Students also received an email of the blog post, but could unsubscribe from the mailing list (just like you can sign up to get new post alerts, and unsubscribe at any point!)

Solution 1: a plugin

I used a plug-in named FeedWordpress. It is as simple as it is efficient: add this plugin, and a new left menu item appears: “Syndication”. (It always feels a bit counter-intuitive to me if the name of a plugin and the menu item aren’t the same. Am I the only one?)

Click on that and then on the sub-menu “Syndicated Sites”. There you can simply add the URL of the blog you want to add. You can be very specific with the category (e.g. https://tinekedhaeseleer.net/pedagogy/)

The plugin will take a moment and likely present you with different feeds, in this case the top-level blog (not only the pedagogy posts) and the comments feed as well. Choose the one you want, and Bob’s your uncle!

If you made a mistake, or if you want to pause a feed for a bit, you can select the feed from the “Syndicated sites” list, click on unsubscribe and then select the option you require, including: unsubscribing while keeping all the posts on this website.

Second use scenario: This is also a great solution if you have multiple blogs from students you want to display on a single site, and this is in fact what I did way back when I first started to build a network of blogs for my Chinese Magical Creatures course in Spring ’17!

Solution 2: an RSS block

The WordPress Gutenberg editor has an RSS block. I used that the following fall and spring semesters (Fall 20/Spring21) to distribute the course announcements from a little purpose-built blog to three different course websites. This again meant I was able to write a single blog post for three courses.

An additional benefit was that I could add the blog in our Canvas LMS, and thus distribute the blog to each Canvas course site, using the <iframe> trick I already shared earlier. (You can embed pretty much any webpage inside <iframe>[place website here]</iframe> tags…) Even for students who always start inside the LMS, they found the links to all they needed on my course websites, via announcement website now embedded on the Canvas course site.

Comparing FeedWordPress, the RSS block, and Inoreader

The RSS block is useful if you need to spread a single source to multiple sites, for instance course announcements, or a news website from a specific organization to two or more websites.

For centralizing a network of blogs such as your students’ sites, I recommend the FeedWordPress plugin, or Inoreader. Both have good options to fine-tune how much of a post you show and how you credit the original author.

My current preference is Inoreader, simply because I use the app/website interface as an intrinsic part of my workflow: I can see which posts are new, and I can easily add tags. The “HTML clip for export” feature is only available for the Pro users, and for me it’s worth the $50 annual fee. But if that’s not an option for you, I hope you can see from today’s post there are still options out there to create a blog network that will be of use to you and your students!