What’s an OPML File and Why Would I Need One

The analogy would be of a small newsletter to the New York Times. An OPML file pulls together a list of rss feeds from one location and aggregates them for you so that you can share them with others. You can use an OPML file creator, but they are becoming less used nowadays as Bloglines can aggregate feeds and find OPML files for you.

How do I find RSS feeds?

Find a site you like and scroll around the page to find a subscribe button. The format varies. Sometimes you’ll see a lot of code. What you’re looking for is the xml or rss at the end of a string. If you’re lucky, it will show up directly in the title bar, in which case – just copy that into your rss location widget. Otherwise, paste the url of the webpage into Bloglines and the feed aggregator will find the feeds for you with some annotation as to how popular they are and what kind of posting goes on there. You can even see in advance a sample feed posting. It’s a good idea that if you have several rss subsciptions that you limit the number of feeds to 1 or 2 per section.

What are Trackbacks and Why Use Them?

Because of the interactive and collegial nature of blogging, we do want to know who is saying what about something we posted or who linked our thoughts on their blog.  That’s why you should use a trackback rather than just a hyperlink.  You can put a widget on your page to find out where people at your site came from (that is which search term or location they started from) and also their country of origin.  There is a downside to trackbacks though, as they can become a magnet for spammers who want free attention to their sites.  You have the option to use the trackback feature or cancel it, just as you would with comments.

Bookmarking Utilities

Raw Sugar

Works like del.ic.ious but offers more flexibility in its utilities. You can add buttons to your menu bar and tag posts immediately.  Categories are extensive and supplement those found in other social bookmarking utilities. 

How to Assign a post to a category

When you are writing a new post, on the side of the screen you will see a
list of your categories. Simple remove the checkmark from the general
category and place a checkmark in the category of your choice.

Permalinks and post slugs for the “nicer” URLs

Did you ever wonder how to tidy up the URLs which have messy search strings which look like this ?page_id=# ? Well you can use permalinks.

What is a post slug? Actually, it’s just the page name used for your URL if you are using permalinks. By default, your post slug will automatically be your page title, however this can be change in the “Write Page”. I would strongly advise you to change your post slug for your pages if you have page title like “Adding a border to your image using Adobe Photoshop”. The reason being your permalinks will be too long. Instead, use a shorter URL like “adding-border” will be much better.

How to put in an OPML file

Go to bookmarks on the dashboard, import bookmarks.

Follow instructions from our course by going to the Steven Downes site. In brief here:

2. Create an OPML file using Stephen Downes' OPML Generator. Select a couple of RSS feeds that you'd like to package together and use this generator to generate an OPML file containing those feeds. All it takes to generate an OPML on Stephen's generator is to provide a name for your file, your name, your email address, the number of feeds you'd like in the OPML file, and finally the feed URLs. Once the generator says "success", you're done! Save the file to your computer then try and add it to your aggregator. A

SLIC Current › Create New Post — WordPress

SLIC Current › Create New Post — WordPress

Posting to WordPress

How to Assign a Post to a Category

When you are writing a new post, on the side of the screen you will see a
list of your categories. Simple remove the checkmark from the general
category and place a checkmark in the category of your choice. Source:

 Why can't I find where my blog feed is?  What does it look like as a feed address?  

In Blogspot it would look something like this. 

yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml

About this site

SLIC [School Library Information Centre] Current is my knowledge management blog which is gathering Web 2.0 topics and applications. I'm writing this for a larger audience who might want to learn how to create a similar blog.