As you may have noticed, you now have a number of blogs to keep up with in this course. First, you need to know when new posts–either by Mercy or myself–appear on this course blog. But you also should keep tabs on what your other classmates are saying on their blogs.
At the very least, you should follow what people are saying on your small group’s blog, but as Mercy’s weekend “round-up” posts have demonstrated, you can find interesting and helpful posts on the other group blogs as well. And you also may want an easy way to know if comments have been left on your posts by myself, Mercy, or another student.
Finally, in my last post, I linked to two blogs about the Civil War that you may also wish to follow.
So that’s at least two blogs, and optionally as many as five or seven, that you should start keeping up with. Fortunately, there is an easy way to know when blogs have been updated. It’s called RSS–for “Really Simple Syndication.” You’ll notice that at the bottom of this blog, and on most other blogs, there are links to “Entries (RSS)” and “Comments (RSS).” These links point to “feeds” for the posts and comments that appear on this blog. To use the feeds, you need a “feed reader,” and then you simply have to add these feeds to your reader (also known as “subscribing” to them). It’s sort of like “following” friends on Facebook and then viewing your “news feed”–instead of going to each of your friend’s profiles, all of the latest news is sent to your feed as it happens. Likewise, once you’ve subscribed to RSS feeds, new posts will simply appear in your reader when they are published, so that you don’t have to bookmark each blog and check it constantly for updates.
If this sounds like a good idea to you, here’s a useful introduction to using RSS, as well as a tutorial about how to use Google Reader, one of the many available web-based services that allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds.
Since you are now publishing your own posts and will soon be working on digital projects with your small groups, you may also want to familiarize yourself with some basic HTML tags. You may never need to use some of these tags, but looking at them is useful because it’s a good reminder that text published on a blog or a webpage isn’t formatted exactly like it would be in a Microsoft Word document. For example, you may have already noticed that indented tabs don’t show up in your blog posts even if they were in the word processing file where you composed your post. That’s one reason why it’s a standard convention when writing blog posts to put a blank line (a hard return) between each paragraph.
Let me know if you have questions about any of this, and if you have other web-savvy tips that you think the rest of the class would find useful, feel free to leave them in the comments to this post.