ITauthor

A couple of weeks ago I published a podcast on the history of RSS. One thing I didn't mention was how some of the early uses of RSS are now pretty much defunct, thanks largely to twitter.

Over the years I've used various feed aggregators, latterly Google Reader, to keep me informed of what the pool of bloggers I'm interested in are blogging about. I'm not a great fan of reading the news on the Web (I get my news through the radio mainly), but I know a lot of people also used to use feed aggregators to keep them up to date with news. I think this is largely a thing of the past.

In recent years I found that I was looking at Google Reader less and less. For the blogs I was really interested in, I used FeedBlitz to mail me every time a new post appeared on those blogs.*

But these days twitter has taken over as the main way I hear about stuff. I use TweetDeck as my window on twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, rather than ever actually visiting those websites. TweetDeck gives you a column of tweets by the people you've subscribed to, a column for FaceBook, a column for LinkedIn, a column for direct message to/by you, etc. But it also allows you to add columns for searches of hash tags. So I have a column that shows any tweets containing #techwriting or #techcomm or #techcomms (the last one may be unnecessary now I think about it). This provides a fairly constant flow of links to interesting information about technical writing. And the good thing is I didn't even have to go out and find these people and subscribe to anything - I just get everything going into twitter that's been marked in this way. Amazingly (so far at least) it seems to be free from spam. And it's really useful.

I used to find Tom Johnson's community blog Writer River good for this kind of thing, and I used to post to it, now and again. But it was cumbersome to post to using the Publish2 browser plugin (which is buggy and required me to enter multiple sets of login information every time I'd cleared my browser cache - which is often when I'm working on WebHelp) - so I got fed up - it didn't seem worth the hassle. And besides, it's so easy to tweet. Aggregators and aggregated sites like Writer River seem like a part of history already. Twitter is so immediate and so easy. It's 140-character limit can be a challenge, but it turns out to be one of the best things about twitter because it prevents verbosity.

Dave Winer's metaphor about news aggregators providing a river of news turns out to fit twitter perfectly. According to the metaphor, you don't need to be by the river every minute of the day, you just go down there whenever you feel like it, or whenever you can, and take a dip - or paddle about a little. Tweets keep on flowing, you'll never read them all - so you don't worry about it.

RSS is still great for a number of things (particularly, for me, the magic of getting podcasts onto my iPod). But as a way of keeping up with blogs you like, or finding out about the big new thing, or being alerted about important news, or telling people you've blogged about something, or telling people about something interesting you've found out there on the internet, RSS just doesn't cut it any more. Twitter beats RSS hands down for all of those things.

And yes, I tweeted about this blog post. 
    

* Want to use FeedBlitz to get emailed about an updated feed? Go to https://www.feedblitz.com and scroll down to "Subscribe to any blog" then enter the URL of the feed you want emailed about (e.g. http://www.itauthor.com/feed/), then click Subscribe.

I’ve added a Google Friend Connect widget to the sidebar of this site. The idea is that if you read this blog you might like to add yourself as a “member” and then other people can see who visits this site and, depending on what you choose to put in your profile, can find out a little bit about you, check out your blog, join your twitter feed, read your shared Google Reader items, have a look at your Flickr photos or your YouTube videos, etc. Yes, it’s another social networking thing.

At the moment I’ve called this item “Friends of ITauthor”. But right now I’m the only one on it, which looks very sad. So please click the Join this site button in the sidebar and add yourself.

ITauthor needs a few more friends than just me!

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Tom Johnson has rejigged the Writer River site again to use a service called Publish2. This site is really just another link aggregation site but it has some features that make it really useful. The great thing about it is the bookmarklet that adds a sidebar to whatever Web page you’re reading. From this sidebar you can add an item to your personal list of page links, stored by Publish2.

The other things you can do with the sidebar are:

• Add the link to any of the newsgroups you belong to.
  Tom has set up a “Technical Communication” newsgroup and it’s the links that get added to this newsgroup that appear on Writer River. This is great because it means you can have your own personal list and then, from that, choose who you share particular links with.
• Send a tweet about the page.
  Rather than going to your twitter client and tweeting about this separately – just write your tweet in the sidebar.
• Publish the link to your blog or to delicious.
  The sidebar has WordPress and delicious integration. In my case, I want to have my own “What I’m Reading” list in my WordPress blog. So I have a “What I’m Reading” category already set up and I have Publish2 set to select this as the default category. The good thing about this is that if Publish2 disappeared tomorrow I wouldn’t lose all my “What I’m Reading” links they way I would if I was just adding details dynamically to my site by pulling in information from the RSS feed for my list at Publish2. There is a Publish2 JavaScript widget that you can add to any Web page to pull information down from Publish2 if you want to do it that way. But by actually posting to my blog from the sidebar it means that data is saved to my WordPress database as well as to Publish2’s database.
  

So here’s how I add things to my “What I’m Reading” list. Note: the way I used to populate this list is described in this post – but it was massively complicated compared to this method.

1. When I've read a page I think other tech writers might be interested in I just go to my Bookmarks list, click the Publish2 link and fill out the sidebar form that's displayed.
2. I type in a description of what I like about the page in the Public Comments box.
3. I select the check box for the Technical Communication newsgroup.
4. The check box for twitter is selected by default - I just add some tweet text.
5. In the Also add this link to section I select the check box for ITauthor.com.  My What I'm Reading category is already selected - I just have to copy some text from the Public Comments box and that becomes a link to the article in the resulting blog post.
6. I click Save and I'm done.
   
   My blog's updated with a new post, Writer River also gets a new link entry and a tweet gets sent out to my twitter followers.
   
   Quick, easy and kills three birds with one stone. Brilliant!

[This post is out of date. For a better method, see this post. - AC, 22 August 2009]

Writer River – the collaborative list of links to tech-writer-related online content – has changed slightly.

You can still post links to it directly, but you can now also syndicate content to the site from your blog. This means that you can produce you own list of things you’ve read and found interesting, publish it on your blog with an accompanying RSS feed, and have those items also appear, alongside everyone else’s, on Writer River.

Why would you want to do this?

There are a few reasons why this might be something you’d like to do.

1. If you maintain a website, you might be interested in getting as many people to visit your site as possible. One way this can happen is through trackbacks (automatically generated links that appear on blog B when a post is published on blog A that includes a link to blog B). If you add items of interest directly into Writer River, the trackbacks will lead back to Writer River. If you list those interesting posts and articles on your own site, the trackbacks will lead people back to your site and boost your numbers.
2. You might just like to have your own list of the things that have interested you, all listed together on your own site. Now, because of the way Writer River is designed, you could already do this by going to the page on Writer River that lists just your posts (you can find this by clicking your name in the list of authors), and grabbing the RSS for this page (e.g. my old list is currently still there at: http://writerriver.com/author/alistair-christie/feed/) and then taking that and publishing it on your own site. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and that’s what it’s for: allowing content to be published in one place and syndicated out for publication in lots of other places. However, if you’re a blogger, it seems weird to post items somewhere else in order to get them to appear on your own site. Better to post to your own site and have that content crop up elsewhere (according to whoever wants to pick up your feeds and use them as they were intended to be used).
3. Doing things this way round means that when a Writer River reader, like myself, clicks an item link at Writer River they are transported to your blog, which gives them the context of who it was who found the thing interesting. The down-side to this is that there’s an extra step in there that people won’t be expecting. You’d expect, when you see something that looks interesting and click you click it, to be taken straight there to the original source, but instead you’re taken to the full version of the reference (e.g. a mini post on itauthor.com) and from there you can click through to the original article. This is a bit disorientating and confusing at first, but it does at least reveal something more about the poster, and it clicks up another hit on the poster’s website.

So how do you do this?

The very, very short and sweet version is:

• Produce an RSS feed containing your reading list
• Tell Tom Johnson (the creator/maintainer of Writer River) about the RSS feed. 
  Tom then adds it to the list of feeds that are aggregated into Writer River.

There are a number of ways you could create your RSS feed. The way I’m going to explain uses categories in a WordPress blog. You could equally well use WordPress tags. You could use another type of blog. You could even manually update a hand-crafted RSS file, if you felt so inclined.  

The basic steps for the WordPress method are as follows:

1. Within your WordPress blog, create a new blog category that you’ll give to all your reading list posts. You can call it anything you like (e.g. “What I’m Reading”) – all it’s used for is to collect together mini blog posts that are simply references to something interesting you’ve been reading. You need to be able to separate these out from your other blog posts so that you can display them separately as a reading list.
2. Alter your home page so that these reading list mini posts don’t appear there. They’re going to be listed separately so there’s no point putting them on the Home Page, and if you don’t exclude them you run the risk of alerting subscribers several times about the same reading list entry.  
         
   To exclude a category from your home page, first get the ID number of the category you want to exclude. You can find the category number by going to your Categories list in the WordPress admin pages, clicking the link for a category and looking in your browser’s address bar for the ID number. Make a note of this.
        
   Next, go to Appearance > Editor and open functions.php. Add the following function (changing 34 in this example to the number of the category you want to exclude):
        
   

   function exclude_category($query) {     
       if ( $query->is_home ) {      
           $query->set('cat', '-34');     
       }    
       return $query;     
   }     
   add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');

   (Source: http://blogmum.com/2009/04/how-to-exclude-categories-from-the-home-page-of-your-wordpress-blog/.)

3. Add a couple of posts about things you’ve read recently.
4. Go to the “What I’m Reading” category on your blog (assuming that’s what you called it) and check you’ve got an RSS feed that lists the items you posted. You do this in WordPress by adding /feed to the end of the URL for the category (for example, my feed is http://www.itauthor.com/category/what-i-am-reading/feed).
5. Now, with the web page version of the RSS feed displayed in your browser, right-click the page and choose to view the source code for the page. 
         
   This will show you the XML that produced this page. This is the RSS feed itself and, after a collection of details about the feed itself, it should contain a couple of item elements: one for each item on your list. Each item element should look something like this: 
          
   

   <item>
      <title>Fascinating Blog Post</title>
      <link>http://www.yourblog.com/path/to/this/particular/blog/entry/</link>
      <comments>http://www.yourblog.com/path/to/this/particular/blog/entry’s/#comments</comments>
   
      <pubDate>Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:31:13 +0000</pubDate>
      <dc:creator>Your Name</dc:creator>
      <category><![CDATA[What I'm Reading]]></category>
   
      <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.yourblog.com/?p=3926</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Fascinating Blog Post. This is a fantastic read. You’d be mad not to 
   have a look [...]]]></description>
      <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://www.fascinatingblog.com/path/to/source/article">
   
   Fascinating Blog Post</a>. This is a fantastic read. You’d be mad not to have a look.</p>
   ]]></content:encoded>
      <wfw:commentRss>http://www.yourblog.com/path/to/this/particular/blog/entry’s/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
   
      <slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
   </item>

            
   The bits that get used on Writer River are the title, which is linked to the URL in the link element (i.e. the individual blog post on your blog) and the the contents of the description element (which are an abbreviated, plain text, version of your post). 
        
   The bit you’ll display on your blog are the contents of the content element, which contain the full text of your post, including any links, images, etc.
6. Copy your feed URL (e.g. http://www.itauthor.com/category/what-i-am-reading/feed) and email it to Tom Johnson asking him to add it to the Yahoo Pipes syndication aggregation he’s got set up for Writer River.

Tips

• Make sure the style of your reading list content doesn’t stray too far from the sort of thing that’s already on Writer River. 
• Don’t post too many items. Writer River works best as a “Best Of” site – so stick to posting just the most interesting things you’ve read. Please don’t just post everything you’ve read!

Other things you can do

• Create a feed on Feedburner.
        
  This isn’t necessary, but it adds a useful element of indirection. This might be useful down the line if your feed URL changes because if you promote the Feedburner version of the feed, rather than the original, then you just need to change the URL details at Feedburner and your syndications won’t break.
        
  It also provides a way of gathering statistics about how your feed is used.
• Create a category template for your “What I’m Reading” category.
     
  Again, why would you want to do this. Well if you don’t then your reading list, with it’s mini blog posts, will have to look like all your other categories. However (following Tom Johnson’s lead on this) I wanted to list my reading list without titles. The reason for this is that the title is linked to the individual page and I don’t want people going from the reading list to an individual reading list post: that would be really annoying for readers. What I wanted was that, if someone is interested in an item, they click the link and go to the web page I’m referring to. So, to do this, you need to be able to use a different template to display just this template.
         
  To create a category template, create a PHP file in your theme’s directory called category-n.php where n is the number of your “What I’m Reading” category. As noted above, you find the category number by going to your Categories page, clicking the link for a category and looking in your browser’s address bar for the ID number.
• Make a template that’s used to display single pages where the post belongs to a specific category.
           
  If you’ve got a category-specific template for your reading list you’ll probably want a category-specific single-post template, so that, when someone clicks a link on Writer River and arrives at your site, the post is displayed in a similar manner to the way it looks on the reading list. In my case this means it gets displayed without the title. And (another Tom Johnson tip) you can also put a note at the top of the page to explain that this is one item from a whole reading list of other links, and include a prominent link to that list (i.e. to your “What I’m Reading” category).
          
  To create a single-post template for a specific category, first add the following to your functions.php file, anywhere between the opening and closing PHP tags:
        
  

  add_filter('single_template', create_function('$t', 'foreach( (array) get_the_category() as $cat ) {     
          if ( file_exists(TEMPLATEPATH . "/single-{$cat->term_id}.php") )    
          return TEMPLATEPATH . "/single-{$cat->term_id}.php";     
  }    
  return $t;' ));

  (Source: http://www.nathanrice.net/blog/wordpress-single-post-templates/.)

  Now you can create a post template by creating a PHP file in your theme’s directory called single-n.php where n is the number of your “What I’m Reading” category. For example, the /itauthor.com/wp-content/themes/blueprint directory on my server now contains the templates: category-34.php and single-34.php.
        
  Once you’ve created these template files, you can edit them from the Edit Themes page of your WordPress admin pages. 
  
• Modify the Press This bookmarklet for your blog
        
  The Press This bookmarklet is a browser bookmark with added functionality provided by some nifty JavaScript. It makes it very easy to create a post relating to a web page you’re currently looking at – so it’s perfect for adding items to your reading list. 
         
  
         
  You get a Press This bookmark by going to the Tools page for your WordPress blog and dragging the Press This link into your bookmarks list.
        
  Note: The bookmarklet uses the inbuilt post editor for WordPress, so if you’ve installed a plugin that swaps the normal post editing buttons for something funkier (e.g. I was using Dean's FCKEditor For WordPress) you’ll have to disable this plugin or you’ll just get a blank text box in the little Press This window. I also had to disable the Disable wpautop plugin, which disables WordPress’s irritating automatic paragraph formatting, because with this enabled any line breaks in the Press This editor disappeared when I published the post.
        
  For me, posting to my reading list is the only thing I use my Press This bookmarklet for, so I want my “What I’m Reading” category to be selected by default.
         
   
        
  
  To add a default category (i.e. already checked) at the top of the Categories list in the Press This window, you need to edit the wp-admin/press-this.php file. Unfortunately you’re going to have to redo this change every time you upgrade WordPress. The stuff you need to add is in red. Change the category number and name as appropriate for your blog.
        
  

  <div id="categorydiv" class="stuffbox">     
    <h2><?php _e('Categories') ?></h2>   
    <div class="inside">     
       
      <div id="categories-all" class="ui-tabs-panel">    
        <ul id="categorychecklist" class="list:category categorychecklist form-no-clear">   
          <!-- Edit this line to suit your setup - my default category number is "34" and its name is "What I'm   
  Reading" –>   
          <li id='category-34'><label class="selectit"><input value="34" type="checkbox" checked    
  name="post_category[]" id="in-category-34"/>What I'm Reading</label></li>     
          <?php wp_category_checklist($post->ID, false, false, $popular_ids) ?>      
        </ul>      
      </div>     

  Kudos to johnke at the WordPress.org forums for suggesting this (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/216525).
• Create a twitterfeed for your reading list.
         
  Twitterfeed is an online resource that allows you to push the contents of an RSS feed (like a feed from a blog) into your twitter account, so that your blog posts (or the first few words plus an abbreviated URL) get sent out to your twitter followers. If you also syndicate your tweets to Facebook it means that your new reading list items will also show up as Facebook status messages.
         
  You can set Twitterfeed to check the RSS feed for your reading list once an hour. You can use the Advanced settings to add a prefix to these posts (I use “I've been reading: “), and I’d recommend setting it to include the “title only” rather than “title & description” because once you’ve added the prefix and the link to your post there isn’t much room for any more than two or three words from your post content.
         
   

Respect

I’ve already mentioned him a few times and, at the risk of embarrassing him, I must doff my cap once again to Tom Johnson who created Writer River and came up with most of the ideas I’ve fleshed out in this post.

Want to find out more? Go read these posts on Tom’s blog:

• "What I'm Reading": A New Feature on My Site and a Tweak of Writer River
• I Need Your Human Aggregated Content

Create a twitterfeed for your reading list.
       
Twitterfeed is an online resource that allows you to push the contents of an RSS feed (like a feed from a blog) into your twitter account, so that your blog posts (or the first few words plus an abbreviated URL) get sent out to your twitter followers. If you also syndicate your tweets to Facebook it means that your new reading list items will also show up as Facebook status messages.
       
You can set Twitterfeed to check the RSS feed for your reading list once an hour. You can use the Advanced settings to add a prefix to these posts (I use “I've been reading: “), and I’d recommend setting it to include the “title only” rather than “title & description” because once you’ve added the prefix and the link to your post there isn’t much room for any more than two or three words from your post content.
       
 

Respect

I’ve already mentioned him a few times and, at the risk of embarrassing him, I must doff my cap once again to Tom Johnson who created Writer River and came up with most of the ideas I’ve fleshed out in this post.

Want to find out more? Go read these posts on Tom’s blog:

• "What I'm Reading": A New Feature on My Site and a Tweak of Writer River
• I Need Your Human Aggregated Content

Now that RSS feeds are all over the place, and we have our own personal feeds provided for us on all sort of social network sites, it’s nice to be able to able to drop an RSS feed into your blog as a list.

Bill Rawlinson’s feedList plugin for WordPress allows you to do precisely that.

As a simple example of what it can do. Here’s my personal Writer River feed and my twitter feed grabbed and stuck together on a blog page:

http://www.itauthor.com/syndicated-posts/