I’m now using FeedWordPress to syndicate all of your blog posts. What this means is that when you write a post on your blog, it will automagically get sucked in and reposted here onto this site. That means this page becomes a one-stop shop for y’all to find the posts from your classmates.
A couple of notes, followed by a question. If you are going to comment on one of your classmates’ blogs, when you click on the title link for the post, you’ll be redirected to that students’ post on his or her page, which is where you should leave your comment. I encourage you to read and comment on each others’ posts. (At times, I might require it, even!)
If you are planning to write posts that are unrelated to this class on the domain you’re using for this class, that’s okay, but we’ll want to make arrangements for that. (You’ll need to use a category that designates some posts as needing to syndicate here onto this page, while other posts have different categories and aren’t. Or you can set up a subdomain that is designated for posts for this class.) If this is an issue for you now, or if it becomes an issue for you at any point this semester, just let me know and we’ll work out a solution.
If you look over at the top of the right-hand sidebar, you will see a pull-down menu called “Categories.” All the posts that I write will be categorized as “David’s posts,” so if you choose that line from the pull down list you’ll go to a separate page that lists only posts by me. All the posts pulled in from your sites will be designated with the category “Student posts,” so you can see those separately too.
[FYI, once you start putting up the group blog posts, you’ll categorize them with “readers,” “responders,” or “historians” as appropriate and then those will show up as categories too. Is it okay if I admit that I’m looking forward, at the end of the semester, to pulling up the category page for the historians’ posts and seeing a reverse-chronological narrative describing where we’ve gone as a class all semester?]
So here’s the question: Does this feel too unwieldy for you? If you would prefer it, I can replace the link to this page in the navigation bar up above to links the pages for my posts and your posts separately. To me, that seems unnecessary, but if the blog space feels too crazy and chaotic for you, I can. Scroll down this page, check out your classmates’ posts embedded amongst mine and let me know any feedback you have.
Note: I’ve added some new pages to the site. You’ll see up above a page called “Student Work,” which links to all of your pages. There’s a subpage underneath that one called “Student Posts,” which is the same category page I linked to in this post–it will bring you to a page of all the student blog posts syndicated on my site. I also added a subpage beneath Blog that will bring you to just posts by me, in case that division is helpful.
I’m also adding a page of resources. For now, it’s just a few links but I’ll add to it over time.