Thursday, April 16, 2009

Contributing to the Grace Hopper Bloggers Via Your Own Blog

If you've been watching the Grace Hopper Bloggers Blogroll (which is to the right of the main content on the actual website), you may have noticed that many contributers wrote posts from their personal blogs. Unfortunately, this means that all their posts show up there, not just the Grace Hopper ones. (I'm guilty of this, too - my posts from The Female Perspective of Computer Science are still showing up there!)

We're going to fix that for the 2009 edition of this wonderful conference. But don't worry - you can still post from your own blog if you want to. The trick is to carefully tag the relevant posts with ghc09 and import the RSS feed just for those tags into this blog.

If you use Blogger, you do this by adding a little bit extra to the end of your RSS feed. The format for the feed is as follows:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/ghc09

If you use Wordpress, follow the tips from this page, where the following templates are provided:
  • http://example.com/category/ghc09/feed/
  • http://example.com/ghc09/feed/ (for WordPress blogs not using “category” in their permalinks)
  • http://example.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=4
TypePad has a detailed article on how to do this in their Knowledge Base. Once you set up your template and create the appropriate xml file, you will be able to access your feed via:

http://example.typepad.com/my_weblog/categoryfeed.xml

If your blog has a custom setup, or isn't one of the three mentioned above, then you'll have to do some Google-fu to figure out how to set up your feed. If you get stuck, try leaving a comment, and hopefully someone will be able to help you out.

5 comments:

Valerie Fenwick said...

I tried to login to the GHC blog account to fix my feed, but it says I am not author of any blogs....

BJ Wishinsky said...

Valerie, you are listed as an author using your gmail account. But you only need to follow Gail's instructions for the feed if you are blogging about GHC09 on another blog. It's not necessary for your posts here.

Valerie Fenwick said...

Thanks, BJ. I seem to have two google accounts :-) I was able to login now, though.

I am planning on blogging on my personal blog again this year. Are we going to have a blog roll like in 2007 on the main ghc site? or will we have to duplicate posts again here, like in 2008?

I cannot see any way to change the specific feed (which I do have for gracehopper) on the blog roll for this blog.

BJ Wishinsky said...

We will reconfigure the blog for GHC 2009 and it will show your updated feed. Please bear with us; we have some testing to do on both gracehopper.org and here to make sure that last year's technical problems in Blogger and WordPress have been resolved.

Jessica Dickinson Goodman said...

Hi,

I've enjoyed being a GHC conference blogger the past two years--when is a good time to start the process of becoming one this year? Thanks!

Jessica