Month: June 2008

Jeffrey’s Twitter Updates for 2008-06-26

  • Still have a sore throat. Was home sick all day today, and do not feel much better yet. #
  • Just got some cake for dessert. Wow, I am exhausted. Off to bed. #
  • @aroberts Good way of mentioning this, Andy. WIth so many social network apps out there, it is easy to miss some. #
  • I am on #Friendfeed http://friendfeed.com/jeffreykeefer #
  • Made it to the office today. Have to call the doctor, as I think I am getting worse. #
  • Anybody a member of ODNetwork? #
  • @jazzychad I know what you mean. Here we are complaining about it, and go right back to use it again and again! I suppose we don’t learn? #
  • @smithjd Reading your post. Autoethnography is my methodology of choice. #
  • @smithjd Your link to “Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture” does not work. #
  • @jazzychad Perhaps you could help them! Hey, they just got another round of funding, so one may think they could upgrade the infrastructure. #
  • @clintlalonde Looking for a degree program or continuing ed or specific sessions only? #
  • Need soup. Waiting for the doctor to call back. #
  • Need soup. Waiting for the doctor to call back. #
  • @clintlalonde Sorry, no suggestions. The reason I asked is the MS program I teach in at NYU now can be done completely online. #
  • Gathering health literacy materials and links for a new project (again) in formation. #
  • Had healthy vegetarian Japanese food for dinner. #
  • Off to get a hair cut (though not too much). My hair is at the in between stage of too long and not long enough. #

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Exclude (Twitter) Feeds from Overwhelming WordPress’s Front Page

Do you use Twitter Tools, the wonderful WordPress plug-in that integrates Twitter feeds into and out from a blog? I do, and the main reason I like it is that it allows me to capture my Tweets on a daily basis as a single blog post.

Why, in turn, might I want this? Two reasons–firstly to capture my words and thoughts as I process life and work, and secondly because the daily blog post generates an email notification that in turn gets sent to friends and colleagues who read emails and not blogs or RSS feeds per se. This allows people who are interested in my life (there are a few of them, at least!) who do not live in the active world of social media, to still get a sense of what I am doing via a daily email push.

However (and here is the issue), I do not like having the front page of my blog filled with (at least) every other post to be a Twitter-post from the previous day. Looking for ways to handle this I finally stumbled upon the great WordPress plug-in Simply Exclude. This plug-in allows for a great amount of control of what sort of content to exclude from parts of a public blog. Go ahead, look down my homepage and see if you can see any Twitter-based posts. No? That is because I had Simply Exclude prevent the daily Twitter post from appearing on my front page. They are still there, such as right here, fully searchable (via keyword, month, category, etc.) and present enough to generate the RSS and email notifications, but flexible enough to make my blog appear more than just a Twitter archive.

While I actively try to have inclusive and engaging instructional events, I like having the option of excluding things from where they really do not fit. Simply Exclude may have some creative uses for WordPress-powered blogs that are more oriented to content management systems than traditional blogs, and I would like to explore these further.  

Jeffrey’s Twitter Updates for 2008-06-25

  • Do not feel too well today. Have been feeling worse and worse all week. Sore throat, lost voice, week – the whole bit. #
  • I have been having a lot of problems using Feedburner. The feeds have not been going through for the last month. Has anybody else had this? #
  • I have posted numerous help issues on the Feedburner (owned by Google) Google group, but no response at all from their tech support. #
  • Seems others are also having Feedburner issues. Any suggestions for other apps like this for WordPress? #
  • The one thing I liked about Feedburner is that it is convenient to send emails to subscribers who do not use RSS feeds. #
  • @mathplourde What conference is that? #
  • Home sick. #
  • Nothing but Feedburner problems. #
  • @Xiang_Cui Welcome to Twitter! #

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WordPress (2.5.1) FeedBurner and RSS Issues

rss I spent part of this morning troubleshooting the complete breakdown of my RSS feeds and new post email notifications. I have been using Feedburner (a part of Google) and Subscribe2, a WordPress plug-in.

It turns out that neither of them have been working in the past few weeks, so anybody who follows my feed via email notification or some feed reading software, it does not appear I have been doing anything! These subscribers missed my Liveblogging ASTD and the recent reflection and thinking I have been doing regarding Learning 2.0 (among other things).

I finally learned that when I upgraded to the most current version of WordPress (2.5.1), the default rss feed has changed, and this change had to be adjusted in the Feedburner system. Did not see this anywhere on their site, and finally stumbled across it on the Group page (and simply am not able to find it again after searching and searching). I have still not solved the Subscribe2 plug-in, though have left 2 questions on the developer’s site  and, by the vacation notification he posted and the number of comments and responses, I am sure they will be responded to).

What did I learn in this troubleshooting?

  1. Google no longer adequately supports Feedburner. The one previous time I had a challenge with this service, I immediately received a reply and some assistance. They have since removed this wonderful help resource, and replaced it with a Google Group for Feedburner. Three days and three questions later, I have still not received a reply. None. Nothing. I wonder if this is Google’s strategy moving forward–put the onus of support onto the community and then step back. While this makes sense with open-source applications like WordPress or Firefox, this is hard to swallow with a huge profit-making company.
  2. Things can be broken without anybody mentioning anything for some time. With the deluge of emails and other forms of notification, it is easy to stop receiving something without noticing it. This seems to be a symptom of information overload.
  3. I was getting more comments than normal, though I am not sure where those were coming from. Perhaps the Twitter integration with my blog, which continued to work, is the reason? It most certainly was not from the population with the RSS and email notifications.
  4. Web 2.0 technology is more integrated than I initially thought. These programs seem to be so connected that if one thing breaks or changes or upgrades, then it is very possible that the whole thing will fall apart. I upgraded WordPress, and they made one small change (the default WordPress RSS feed) that I did not notice (after all, who would look for that sort of change?) this, and it caused lots of problems.
  5. Plan for more time than it seems it should take. No matter how small an issue appears, it can always take much much longer to troubleshoot it than it initially appears.

So, now that I at least have some RSS capabilities, I wonder what changes I may notice?

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