New Blog Feature

When I started the blog, one of things I wanted to do down the road was find a simple way I could post interesting articles and blog posts I read on a daily basis on my site - not necessarily education related, just anything I happened to read and find thought-provoking, in hopes that just maybe, a few of my students (or anyone else who comes across my blog) might read something they don't usually read. I knew that there would be some way to do this using RSS and furl or del.icio.us, I just wasn't sure exactly how I could go about learning the programming necessary to do it.

Well turns out, there was a much easier solution, thanks to a wonderful little site called RSS DIgest. They will take any RSS feed and turn it into javascript that can easily be put into any page. That combined with the RSS feed for a certain del.icio.us tag (I happened to use the tag 'today') creates the new list on the sidebar: Things I've Read Recently. Thanks to Jeffrey Veen for this info.

Further simplifying the process was a little javascript thanks to Peter Parkes which gave me a bookmarklet which will automatically save the page I'm viewing to my del.icio.us account with the tag 'today,' therefore, in effect, adding the link to my blog's sidebar.

So new feature over on the right. The first page, other than the pages that explained this process, was today's NY Times column by Matt Miller, who was a high school student of my student teaching advisor. I can't think of much more I would want as a teacher than to have a student become something like Matt.