ITRT Aggregation Site Reflection


cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by bionicteaching

Back in November of 2010,1 I posted about building an ITRT “mother blog”2 to share things I thought might be useful for Henrico ITRTs.

It seems like it’s working on my end. There are currently 1912 posts from at least 261 different sources3 and that includes a period of time when Delicious feed stopped working for some reason. That’s an average of about 3.5 posts a day. The most important part is that this is part of my work flow. I am not working harder but I’m doing more with the energy I was already expending.

Documenting for an audience has changed some nuances of my process as well. I add a few more tags in Delicious. I have more of tendency to add interesting quotes and explanations to links in the hopes of providing context/interest for others. All in all, it simply makes me more aware of an external audience. That probably helps me in the long run as well as I’ve been known to forget my own ideas.

There are virtually no comments on the site but I have seen evidence through conversations that at least a few people read it at times. I think I’m good with that for now. It’s a step in the right direction.

Next up for consideration is how to keep my sadly neglected portfolio site updated in the context of a workflow. I had to update a resume this year and I had to refer to my calendar to try to remember what I did this year. I never want to do that again.

I think this will be fairly interesting and something we’re going to be exploring with interested ITRTs in the coming year. I can certainly speak to the good things that come from documenting your work online and engaging with all the smart people on the Internet.


1 542 days ago.

2 Just one of those aggregation blog populated through other RSS feeds.

3 There are 119 posts under “author unknown.”

5 thoughts on “ITRT Aggregation Site Reflection

  1. Count me as one that reads that feed. The bionicteaching stuff duplicates what I read here, but I enjoy seeing the things you bookmark in delicious and stuff like that. Feedwordpress is a great approach. I played around with “Lifestream” type stuff with aggregation blogs before using Sweetcron but ultimately I always duplicated stuff. I would post something on Youtube, but then I might tweet about it too, or then I might blog about that video I posted, which would also tweet a link to that blog post, and suddenly I have 5 references to the same video on the aggregation blog. I guess keeping it simple is a better approach.

  2. I too appreciate it and am slow to connect it all, but see the value in it. I wonder if you have played with http://ifttt.com/wtf It is an “if this then that” site. Seems to be a different way to do the same thing. I just like the thought-provoking package it’s wrapped in.

    1. I have. IFTTT is slick. I like the visual programming aspects. I think Timmmmmmy even messed around with that for some DS106 stuff.

  3. So, I finally got on the LinkedIn bus last night and am now fully entrenched. I thought I would add to this post since it pertained somewhat to my topic 🙂 What would be the best way to start up a personal blog? I want to be able to post I would like for it to be a place for my career portfolio and serve both functions to ease the maintenance. I kind of would like to pull in some thingsup various thoughts and work samples from the H21 site etc. so that I don’t have to duplicate work. I’ve done things like web hosting with specific domains in the past and built from scratch with Flash or with WordPress. Seems like WordPress would be the best bet. Just not sure what would be the best-looking, easiest, and relatively cheapest route and thought you might have some good suggestions for things list hosting servers. Thanks for any pointers.

    1. Take a look at Hippy Hosting. I know it sounds flaky but it’s really cheap – $10 for a year and it’ll let you do all the stuff Henrico does with WordPress to enable auto reposts etc. It’s run by Tim Owens from UMW and is on the same provider as UMW blogs.

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