In the post below, I wondered if it was possible to customize feeds from my central blog to different feeds. 

The reason is that I have logins for Facebook and ELGG.  Two different web sites: Facebook is a social networking site for college students and alumni, and ELGG is an “online social network for those interested in education, learning technology and new approaches to teaching and learning.”  Both allow you to import content from your own blog.

I was concerned that my ELGG colleagues might not want to read about my connection to The Departed, and my Facebook buddies might not be interested in IMS Content Interoperability.

Turns out there is a way to customize my blog for both sites, using 3 RSS tricks!

Trick 1: WordPress category URLs

When you create a WordPress blog, you set up “categories” that you can use to tag each post.  For example, this post is tagged with “WordPress tricks,” “ELGG,” and “Facebook.”  If you go to www.jobriga.com/journal/ (the address of my main blog) and click on “WordPress tricks” on the right, it’ll bring up all the blog entries tagged with “WordPress tricks.” 

You can also note that the URL changes to string below:

 www.jobriga.com/journal/?cat=4 

This means that “WordPress tricks” has an ID of 4, and so the URL is saying the following:

Pull up all the entries on www.jobriga.com/journal/ where category = 4

Trick 2: WordPress RSS feeds

WordPress also allows you to easily set up a RSS feed for your blog.  RSS feeds convert your blog into a format that can be read by other news aggregators.  You can see the RSS feed for this blog by adding ?feed=rss2 to the URL:

 www.jobriga.com/journal/?feed=rss2

Trick 2.5: Combining Category URLs and RSS feeds

If you combine these two tricks into a single URL string, you can create a RSS feed for a specific category:

 www.jobriga.com/journal/?cat=4&feed=rss2

which says:

Pull up all the entries on www.jobriga.com/journal/ where category = 4 & feed = RSS 2 (really simple syndication 2).

So, it’s possible to create a RSS feed of a specific category (e.g. all the categories related to “WordPress tricks”).

Trick 3: Importing the RSS feeds into other sites

Facebook and ELGG both allow you to automatically pull RSS feeds from other sources into your account.  Facebook calls them “Notes,” and ELGG calls it a “blog.”

I created two new categories in WordPress: one called “ELGG” and one called “Facebook.” I then got the URLs for each of these categories

All entries tagged with “ELGG” – http://jobriga.com/journal/?cat=28&feed=rss2

All entries tagged with “Facebook” – http://jobriga.com/journal/?cat=29&feed=rss2

I then logged into ELGG and subscribed to http://jobriga.com/journal/?cat=28&feed=rss2, and logged into Facebook to subscribe to http://jobriga.com/journal/?cat=29&feed=rss2.  Now, every entry I tag with “ELGG” shows up in my ELGG blog, and every entry I tag with “Facebook” shows up in my Facebook Notes. 

This makes it easy for me to determine where my content goes – now I can publish the content once, and send it to multiple places.  I can also target my blog to the appropriate “channel” of content. 

Publishing in the 21st century.  Nice!