School Aggregators (Con't)

Still thinking more about this Bloglines aggregator creation for my school…another “alternative” would be to just create a specific account at Bloglines where I aggregate all of the Hunterdon Central feeds and then post the address to the public version of that list. The upside of that is it would minimize what people have to do in terms of setting up their own accounts. (I know that the process is easy, and maybe I should trust that most people will be able to follow the instructions.) Downside is that you can’t see what content is new as nothing comes in bold in the public version, for obvious reasons.

And to be honest, I want people to “get” how this whole aggregator thing works. I’m thinking they might start just subscribing to the Hunterdon Central channels, but when they get the hang of it, they’ll add more and more. (BTW, Bloglines has a nice list of “Top Blogs” for easy sign up. And I’m going to provide some RSS support as well.

Another area where this will all help is in monitoring content on the site. If it ends up where two or three people are ultimately responsible for checking content, the aggregator is going to make a big difference. Teachers are already aggregating and checking the content of their student sites. The webmasters will chack the rest. That’s why every site I create I add to my own Bloglines account right now so I can track what’s happening already.

Lot’s more to work through and think about, as always…