Syndicating your blog entries
We all lead multifaceted lives. As individuals we have personal news, family news, work with organisations we treasure (such as charities) and then, of course, client facing responsibilities, internal work issues and communities of practice.
Many of the most prolifant bloggers blog content in many of these facets. But readers come to these sites to get certain types of information. To them, the rest can be noise.
This article is about how you can deliver to them only the content type of this site, as that’s what’s relevant to them.
This site offers the ability to “syndicate” other blogs. For instance, most of my entries (including this one) come from http://martin.cleaver.org even though you are likely reading it entry elsewhere. To Syndicate means to copy content, the same way newspapers make their stories available for other newspapers to use. This means your message goes out further with the system doing the hard work for you. RSS means “Really Simple Syndication”.
How to syndicate to this site?
If you want to show only certain categories of postings you must set that up before doing this next step. See below for details.Syndicating requires only that you have an account and that it is configured to feed from RSS.
- Sign up for an account
- Go to Blogroll | Syndicated
- In the box “Website or newsfeed:” Type the RSS feed for your site. This is typically http://yoursitename.com/feed
- If you don’t know where this is, simply put the address of your blog in and this site will give you suggestions to pick from
Now, if you take a look at http://martin.cleaver.org you will notice many more entries on that site than are here.
The secret to having only some postings filter down is 1) in this site’s category list and 2) in configuring syndication on your site. After setting up the category list you should restrict to “don’t create new categories and don’t syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar category” using Options | Syndicated.
The site is configured to pull the RSS feeds periodically. Give it a couple of hours and you should see your content up.
If you see the wrong types of content up you can just delete posts on this site. Deleting it here won’t touch them on your original site.
Like everything, I welcome feedback on this site.
