Recently, I was asked to create a group blog for the Student Affair's Green Team. I decided to use the Penn State blog system. The team consists of teams from each of our 6 buildings, so I wanted to create a page for each team to keep the information organized. The problem I had was that I really wanted to have each team's blog post displayed on their page as well as on the actual blog. I contacted Brad Kozlek for help because I couldn't figure out a way to do it on my own. He was able to help me and I thought some other people might find what we did interesting.
Below is a link to a sample of what I did. It's not the actual blog, just me playing around.
http://www.personal.psu.edu/azs2/blogs/green/university-health-services-green-team.html
http://www.personal.psu.edu/azs2/blogs/green/university-health-services-green-team.html
If you'd like to do something like this to or just bring in posts to a page on your own blog, follow the instructions below. There are a couple of ways to do it, but the easier of the two ways (for a non programmer) involves Google Reader and Tag RSS Feeds. It looks like a lot of steps, but it is really easy and doesn't take much time at all.
First you need to get the URL for the RSS Feed for the tags you want to be displayed on the page. To do this, go to http://blogs.psu.edu/search/ enter the tag and click Search Tags.
- For Windows, right click Subscribe to Feed and select Copy Link Location.
- For a Mac, click the the Control key and select Copy.
Next, you need to use Google Reader. If you don't already use it, go to http://www.google.com/reader and log in with your Google ID. Sign up if you need to, it's worth it!
- After opening Google Reader, click Add a Subscription.
- Paste the URL into the text box and click Add as you would add any other Feed to Google Reader. You will need to create a folder to make this happen.
- Look under Subscriptions towards the bottom on the right side for the feed you just added.
- Highlight the feed and use the drop-down menu to create a New Folder, by selecting New Folder and typing a name into the text box.
- Click the Subscriptions drop-down and select Manage Subscriptions.
- Next, select Folders and Tags.
- Make the Folder Public by clicking on the RSS icon.
- Click Add a Clip to Your Site. Adjust the Title, Color Scheme and Number of Items to what you want and then check Show Item Notes.
- Once you are happy with your selections, copy the Javascript.
- Go back to your blog and select the page that you would like to add the feed to.
- Select the <A> to paste the script into the HTML of your blog.
- Save the changes and publish.
- Don't be alarmed if when you tag items in your blog to be displayed on the page blog too they don't immediately show up in the list. Be patient (unlike me). They will show up in about 30 minutes or so.
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