What is syndication?

Want to syndicate other’s blogs on your site?  Not sure what this means?  Let’s say you have a class full of students who are blogging throughout the semester and you want to aggregate their blogs to your home page (like this or this).  There are specific plugins and widgets most useful for syndication.

Widgets and Plugins Commonly Used for Syndication

  • FeedWordPress
    • Use this to input the blog address (or web address) of the posts you plan to syndicate
  • Author Avatar Grid Widget
    • Allows for you to create a grid of images representing each of the authors of the various blogs being aggregated to your site
  • WP User Avatar
    • Allows you to personalize your avatar for the site
  • Ultimate Category Excluder
    • Allows you to ensure that any posts that aren’t ones you post to your site (e.g. student’s posts) don’t show up on your homepage (if you have your posts showing there)
  • List Authors
    • A widget that allows you to show a list the authors of blog posts on your main site

Things to Consider When Syndicating

If you are syndicating your students’ blog posts to your site, where do you want want them to be placed?  Do you want them to be mixed in with your blog posts?  What if your students are blogging for multiple classes (or if they are writing personal blogs for their site), do you want all student posts to syndicate to your site (or just posts related to your class?

  • The general solution to address the questions above is to use categories in blog posts; there are multiple ways to use categories depending on your needs.
  • The OPTIMAL use of categories for syndicating student blogs is to assign your class a specific category and have students use that specific (categories are case sensitive and punctuation sensitive — they need to be entered EXACTLY as you tell students) whenever they write and submit a blog for your class.  When you enter the student’s feed into FeedWord Press, you can adjust the settings so that only blog posts with that match your existing category will be syndicated.

 

Confused?  Need more help?  We don’t blame you.  The truth about syndication is that it can be tricky getting it set up.  If you want to syndicate blogs to your page, contact us.