Pimping my blog

I’m not very good at leaving well enough alone. I am also a “one stop shopping” kind of person (though you wouldn’t think so considering all the garbage I have scattered across the net). I want this blog to be my central location for this class. So I’m messing with widgets and feeds and pages so everything will be right here where I can get to it.

I started by fooling around, not on my blog, but with Library Thing. I’d been reading the books I mentioned in my last post, and realizing that Library Thing could help me keep track of the many books I’ve been reading about the internet. They’ve been starting to blur together, where I’ll remember an idea but forgot where I read it. I noticed they had some widgets. So I used one to create a page with the books I’ve read tagged with “internet”.

I got a little confused about the tags, since it looks like we could use either Diigo or Delicious. I stared with Delicious a few years ago, and was convinced by persuasive companions to switch to Diigo, with cross-posting to Delicious. And I do like the highlighting and annotation features of Diigo very much. But the cross-posting isn’t fool-proof, and now some good people are moving away from Diigo because they have developed a pay structure (though educator accounts are free). I added four widgets: two each for Diigo and Delicious (eci831 and eci831readings tags). I noticed Alec posted our first article to read in Delicious, not Diigo. So I’ve removed the Diigo widgets, hoping my cross-posting will work well enough.

Then I wanted the blogs of all the cool open ed people I’ve heard of on the sidebar, so I made a new folder in Google Reader. I discovered the “manage subscriptions” link (cleverly hidden at the bottom).

There I could get the code to put the blog links to any folder into a widget. So far, so good.

Then I wanted all of my colleagues’ blogs here, with their names. I added them to links, which worked fine, but then I have to click on everyone’s separately. So I tried Pageflakes to put them all together, but they’ve gone to a Sponsored Ad thing and the ad was very large. I went to Netvibes, which I’ve used once before, and entered the six URLs for my colleagues’ blogs. It made a box for each person’s blog, showing “headlines”. Then I noticed a cool “reader view” button, and when I pressed it, the display went to everyone’s posts aggregated and dated in order — very cool! I wanted to share, but after an hour of struggling found out I can’t. Netvibes only lets you share your public pages. It took three tries to get the private page to “share” to the public page, and then I discovered there was no “reader view” button.

You cannot, I finally discovered using Twitter, display a public page in reader view. Now I was getting mad — I just wanted a link to where I could read everyone’s posts, aggregated by date. I ended up back at Google Reader, making another folder, then manage subscriptions to get a public page showing it just like I wanted it. I linked that in another widget. Maybe I should put it on a page…. I put it on a page with iframes, and it looked good last night, but overnight it disappeared. That sucks. So it’s in a text widget as Aggregated Student Blogs on the sidebar. At least I can get there from here.

What are you doing to pimp your class blog?