Embedding RSS Feeds in BlackBoard
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010Feeds (RSS or Atom) are one of my favorite features of the web these days. Who, what, why? Really Simple Syndication makes it incredibly easy to share the web in real time. As a publisher it means that your audience can subscribe to see updates as they roll out – imagine a newspaper that always carried the most recent news. As a reader, I can subscribe to online content (text, video, audio) and know that what I find interesting is going to find me, rather than requiring me to forage for new information continuously. I don’t have to go to the news stand and hunt for the magazines that carry the articles that I want to read, instead the articles I want to read are delivered to me.
Right, that’s all well and good, but how can you use it? Well, RSS Feeds happen to be something that you can embed in a website – and for that matter, inside of Blackboard. How can you tell if a site has an RSS feed? Easy, look for this exciting logo:
If you happen onto a website with this icon displayed in the address bar, or somewhere on the page, you’ve got yourself a site with an RSS feed! Okay, so what do you do with it? Great question, and here’s the step by step tutorial for inserting an RSS feed into a blackboard page.
Step 1
Identify a web site with an RSS feed that you want to embed:
It’s important to note that the RSS feed is not the same as he URL. I want the feed address, which is going to look a little different. Instead of http:// I’m going to look for something that starts with feed://. To find the feed address I need to look for that RSS logo I talked about earlier. Once I find it, I’m going to click on it and choose “subscribe to feed,” this will display the address that I want in my browser’s address bar. It might, however, also display the page as a long list of code.
Huh?! Pictures say more than words sometimes, so let’s look at what I mean: After I click on the RSS button I may see something like this:
or like this
You’ll notice that in both cases I have an address that starts with “feed://” rather than “http://” Okay, so now that I’ve found the address I want, things get a little simpler.
Step 2
Head over to: http://grazr.com/ Copy your feed address, and paste it into the box underneath: Create your free widget now. Click “Create Widget”
Step 3
Okay, now you’ve got some options in determining how your feed is going to look. Let’s take a look at how to customize your widget. From this page click “More Options…”
Step 5
Here I’m going to change the options to make the widget a little bit larger. In the width box I’m going to up the size to 550 pixels, and in the height box I’m going to up the size to 600 pixels. When you’re done, your settings should look like this:
Your widget should look something like this:
Step 6
Now we want to copy out the HTML code for the widget we’ve just made. You’ll find the code over on the left hand side in an orange box. You want select all of the text, right click and copy the “Embed code.”
Step 7
Head on over to your Blackboard control panel and click on “External Links.”
Step 8
Create a new “Item”
Step 9
Name your item. Now click on the Edit HTML button on the page. This button looks like this <> and is circled in the picture below. After you’ve clicked on the edit HTML button you can paste in the HTML code from grazr.com. Click Save.
Step 10
Congratulations, you’ve now embedded an RSS widget into a blackboard site. You can now click on external links to see if your widget shows up. It should look similar to the picture below.
