rss

In the next week or two, I'm going to configure the Feeds module to begin aggregating RSS feeds added on Open Source Catholic members' profile pages. If you'd like your feed added, make sure you go to your user account page (log in and click on 'My account' under your username) and Edit it to add the URL.

I recently launched a new news aggregator website, Catholic News Live, which runs atop Managing News, a Drupal-based feed aggregator. The site grabs about 50 different Catholic website and blog feeds every three-to-five minutes, and pulls all the stories into the main feeds page.

After that, I manually sort the stories into one of many different 'channels,' which basically hold stories pertaining to a certain topic. The front page has it's own feed (with all aggregated stories), and each channel has a feed. In fact, you can even go to the Search page, search for a topic, then grab a feed for that topic!

There are a few highlighted searches already, but you can search for whatever you'd like and save that as a feed (kind of like Google News' daily email digest functionality, but more instantaneous).

All of this funcationality is built into Managing News (a great all-in-one solution, bye the way), and I'm excited for what the future of the site holds. Right now I have all the 'News' channel items feeding into the Catholic News Live Twitter feed (@cathnewslive) via HootSuite, but I may switch to using the Drupal Twitter module at some point (haven't decided how much I want to stick in the Twitter stream yet).

Does anyone want to help sort the news? At this point, it's just me, and it can get a little tedious ;-)

Also, if you see a feed missing, please comment on this post with a link, or find out how to get your feed added on the CNL About pages. You can also grab a badge to display whether your site is featured on CNL from the badges page!

I hear from many people involved in Diocesan and organizational work that they are interested in "doing more things online" and "connecting with their members online." it's great to wish for these things, and even better to try to achieve them. But wouldn't it be nice to actually achieve these goals?

It's not the hardest thing to do. And it's not like technology is standing in the way and is extrememly hard to use... But time and time again, I see things done that hinder the Church's ability to truly communicate and connect with it's members online in the best way possible. One such incidence was the start of a new "blog" by Archbishop Timothy Dolan on the Archdiocese of New York's website.

The reason I put "blog" in parentheses is that this so-called blog could be compared to an eight cylinder engine firing on only four pistons; there are many things missing:

• There in no RSS or Atom feed to allow people to subscribe and receive automated updates of new blog posts (though there is a feed for each posts' comments... but seriously, which is more important???).
  • As an aside, once you have a feed, you also need to make sure you integrate it properly so there's not only an easily visible link or button for it on the web page, but it's also appearing in the site's meta tags so people using modern web browsers can subscribe easily in the standard way.
• In the absence of a feed, there is no email list or any other method with which the diocese could "push" updates to the faithful.
• The main page of the blog doesn't even show the content!
• There's no way to promote, rate, or otherwise interact with the content - not even a "post to Twitter" link (though there are comments, so that's a plus).

One positive aspect is that the 'blog' is incorporated into the rest of the Archdiocese of New York's website, so all the Google link power of the archny.org domain exists within the blog posts, something that doesn't happen for many groups who choose to host their blogs elsewhere (the highest profile blog I know of like this is the USCCB Media Blog, hosted on Blogger). Another positive aspect is the fact that the blog pages are well-formatted in terms of their html - using H2, <p>, etc. correctly :-) Continue Reading »