Documentation:Embed Student Content to Your Blog
In UBC Blogs, you can add a RSS feed to your site. Using this, you can create a feed that compile student blog, and then embed it to your website. This can be very useful especially when you are planning to create a connected course. Your course blog will function as the central hub for students where students can access to different blogs in one place.
Example
Step1: Create an instruction for students
Create an instruction for students. Ask your students to :
- Create a new blog through blogs.ubc.ca (or if they already have a blog, they can use their existing blog and proceed to the next step. )
- Create a category to designate posts that students will want to appear on the main course hub site. For example, if the course is about international economics, ask them to create a category called "international economics"
- After your students have created a category, ask them to send you the category feed URL to you. The category feed URL will be http://URL of the blog/category/name(category slug name) of the category. So for example, if the URL of the student blog is http://blogs.ubc.ca/riesandbox/ and the category is International Economics, then my category feed URL will be: http://blogs.ubc.ca/riesandbox/category/international-economics/feed.
Step2: Aggregate the feed
- Keep all of the feed URL that you got from students in Step1 in one text file, since most feed aggregators do not keep data.
- In order to aggregate the feed you will need to use an external feed aggregator. For example: Chimp Feedr
- Use the Feed Aggregator in step 2 to aggregate all of the feed URL you have collected from students.
- The feed URL will output as a single feed. (For example: http://mix.chimpfeedr.com/222bb-Test ). In the first few minutes, an error message may show up in the feed, but the feed will start working in few minutes.
 | Important: If you are going to add additional students' feed to aggregator, unfortunately, you will have to recreate the aggregated feed (i.e. repeat Step2).Therefore, it is important for instructors to keep all of the feed URL in a separate text file. |
Step3: Embed the feed to your site
- Go to Dashboard>Plugins and activate Feed Shortcode 1.0.3 plugin. If you are creating a course using UBC CMS, you can skip this step because Feed Shortcode is activated by default on all UBC CMS sites.
- Edit the page or create a new page so that you can insert the feed.
- After you edit or create a page, enter the following shortcode [feed url="URL of the aggregated feed" view="100"] . For example, if the URL of the aggregated feed is http://mix.chimpfeedr.com/222bb-Test , then the shortcode will be [feed url="http://mix.chimpfeedr.com/222bb-Test" view="100"]. "View" is the number of the blog post that will show up in the feed. Since RSS shortcode does not have a pagination feature like in blogs, I set the example to 100. You can change the number to higher or lesser number.
- Save /publish the post and you're done! You can also change the format of the feed. Please see Feed Shortcode | CMS for reference.