Comments on: Building a school website one blog at a time

By: Rob Wall

Rob Wall — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 19:32:17 +0000

LOL - true enough, Cindy. Sometimes the jargon around all of this prevents someone who is new to these topics from picking up on things too easily. Ironic, since we’re trying to do things that enable communication!

By: Cindy

Cindy — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:58:28 +0000

I, for one still look at RSS, PHP, Atom, Drupal etc. as terms happen only in the Alien's Land.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Well, I am sure there are many teachers, lecturers who can sail through any technical stuff like a song! No problem!

Cindy

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:31:21 +0000

I’m trying to start something similar at my school using WordPress. I’m trying to get people used to reading the blog format and then eventually using them. I’ve got one teacher using a blog to manage her homework page at http://byrdmiddle.org/hunnicutt. This type of webpage is something blogs are perfect for, far superior to SchoolNotes which is what a lot of my teachers use.

I also started a links/resource page (an attempt at a home brewed del.icio.us as the site is blocked by our filters) at http://byrdmiddle.org/links. Hopefully as these thing prove their worth I’ll be able to talk some people into allowing me to put WordPress on a school server rather than having to run it outside the system.

I’d like to get our school publishing announcements and the like to the main page using WordPress but I’ve run into the problem that we don’t have a decent (allowed) way to read the rss feeds. Bloglines is blocked and the two browsers we are allowed to have on the computers are the old IE for Macs and Safari in Panther. A frustrating situation.

By: Alan Levine

Alan Levine — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 05:44:57 +0000

Stephen- MagpieRSS parses Atom already.

You don’t always have to be doing this via RSS if it is sitting on the same server. One nice thing about Movabletype is you can set it up to publish just some simple text files on your server in a specified place, and your maiin page, if say it uses something like PHP, can simply embed the contetn via an include statement.

This is my approach for using MT to create a podcast publisher for different sub-sites (via category feeds):
http://cogdogblog.com/2005/10/21/podcast-pub/

Also in MT, you can use some of the plugins that allow you to have multiple bloigs share content; I’ve used the MTOtherBlog plug-in (http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/otherblog.php) for our Ocotillo Projject, so that the main page (it is a MT site) is automatically updated when any of the four subsidiary blogs is updated:
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2004/07/15/ocotillo.html

In someways you can do a bit more with MT because you can have one ppost generate all kinds of content files.

On th eother hand, you could find ways to have different WordPress sites perhaphs share the same database tables, and develop some custom code for the front page to grab specific items from the database.

Thanks for some of the other examples, which should appear in an upcoming presentation covering this very topic- using blogware for propeling sites that are not strictly blogs per se.

On the other hand, I really miss the smell of fresh dittos.

By: Sarah Chauncey

Sarah Chauncey — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 03:15:52 +0000

I have been using Movable Type (Six Apart) as a content management system to feed websites for a few years. (I used Blogger to do the same years before they were purchased by Google). I now use Movable Type to feed the Grandview Elementary School Library website where I have taken a position as the Library Media Specialist. Every page is fed by one or more Movable Type “categories”. A great feature is the ability to associate the same post with multiple categories - hence the ability to show a book at mulitple grade levels when appropriate. You can feed multiple categories into the same page making it simple to include different content in different sections of the page. All of the “feeds” are created with templates pointing to the categories. I use Typepad for Mrs. Chauncey’s Blog — just because I enjoy some of its features. www.grandviewlibrary.org — Sarah

By: Christopher Harris

Christopher Harris — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 16:02:10 +0000

Quick thing to look into: K2 doesn’t play well with IE. If your classroom terminals are IE based, you may need to tweak the theme out a bit to make it work.

Otherwise, sounds like a great idea. You might also want to look into a true content management system (CMS) like Drupal (http://drupal.org) or something else from http://www.opensourcecms.com. I am using a Drupal installation to manage a website for my school library system (http://sls.gvboces.org) that allows direct aggregation in a sidebar and other very cool things.

By: James Farmer

James Farmer — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:05:50 +0000

Give me a shout if you need to talk WPMU at any point… I’m not great technically but I’ve got a pretty good understanding.

By: Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 19:19:12 +0000

It would be pretty simple to do in PHP - for me, the only thing I haven’t figured out yet is using the Magpie RSS aggregator to harvest Atom (you need it for the Blogspot posts).

By: XplanaZine

XplanaZine — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 15:48:24 +0000

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