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.