Automatic Distribution of Blog Posts

Automatic Distribution of Blog Posts In this fast paced world of electronic media, any way you can find to cut corners, without jeopardizing your content, is worth a lot. Especially as educators, we have a lot on our plates already without having to worry about distributing our blog posts throughout the Internet. Luckily, some really smart people out there have made ways we can acceptably cut corners and improve our productivity. There are several solutions that help you automatically post your content, distributing it throughout social media networks or to individual kids in your class. This post will just scratch the surface on what is possible, touching on a few simple solutions for distributing content. RSS The RSS feed stands for "Rich Site Summary" but you may also hear it "Really Simple Syndication." Both of these phrases accurately capture the concept of the RSS feed. For most blogging platforms, you can access the raw RSS feed by typing in /feed/ on the end of the extension. Some platforms like Blogger, have a little more complex directory (see: http://moderninstruction.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default). The idea behind RSS is that regular visitors to your blog or webpage can subscribe to your RSS feed for a quick notification when you post new content. Other uses may include using the XML content generated by the feed to create a scrolling ticker on your webpage or a platform like Google Reader (soon to be obsolete) to aggregate a lot of RSS feeds into one location for you daily news. Social Network Syndication While there are a lot of definitions of "syndication" based on what industry you're in, for the web industry, it means making "a portion of a web site available to other sites or individual subscribers" (Wikipedia). Solutions for pushing content out to social networking sites or to individuals are a dime a dozen, but we'll discuss how this takes place using a simple app called NetworkedBlogs. NetworkedBlogs allows you to register your blog(s) and then push a summary of the content out to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. This gives your followers on these platforms a quick notification that you have posted new content. NetworkedBlogs does not give a lot of flexibility to control the abstract (usually just the first few lines of your blog) but it does push out the abstract each time so you don't have to worry about it. What other resources have you found that help you save time during content distribution? Pasted from