What's New for May?

The work has been primarily "behind-the-scenes," but, worry not, I have been plugging away at the Aiken Writing Project web site. Here is what's new on the site:

An Inline Editor

For each blog, image, page, story or book entry, users can now use our automatic WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor to "easily" include the html code for a variety of simple text and layout options, such as bold, italics, colored text, images, fonts, etc. Pretty nifty, eh? With a little prompting, I may even add smiley faces.

A Feed Aggregator

Feed aggregators work with certain web content--primarily blogs and news--to allow rss subscriptions. The rss subscriptions will automatically update your web site when the blog or news source is updated. If you have updated links to Reuters, CNN, Fox News, etc. stories on your Yahoo! or Google homepage, you're already familiar with how feeds work. Organized properly with specific taxonomies, feeds can make the web browse for you. (Of course, I will need to get better at my mad taxonomy skills.)

Eventually, I hope the AWP web site will include a variety of feeds to which users can subscribe and organize for their specific needs. If you have a favorite professional blog or news source that you like to read every once in a while, please pass it along to me; I'll be sure to subscribe to it through the Aiken Writing Project site. In the meantime, once you log-in, feel free to peruse the NCTE Inbox Blog of Traci Gardner and Millie Davis for their thoughts and classroom ideas.

For more information about classroom blogging in general and some discussion of rss, see Kevin Hutchison's "Bringing the World to My Doorstep: A Teacher's Blog Reading Habits" written for the National Writing Project site.

Well, that's all for now. I promise more later. Remember, to take advantage of all this stuff, you must create an account.