Resources

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Your Resources is Elgg's RSS aggregator

RSS feeds are chronologically ordered abstractions of website content that allow you to keep track of new material from a central location. In practice this means you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of weblogs you are interested in, and receive automatic notification of new posts. Most feed readers, Elgg's included, allow you to read an aggregated view of all the content you have subscribed to.

[edit] Simple subscriptions

To subscribe to an RSS feed in Elgg, you need to know its URL. Then, perform the following steps:

  1. Select 'Your Resources' from your toolbar
  2. Paste the RSS feed URL into the subscriptions box and press 'Subscribe'
  3. That is it

The system will acknowledge your subscription request and automatically fetch new content.

You can now keep up-to-date on all your RSS feeds by clicking on the 'View aggregator' submenu option.

The 'feeds' submenu option provides a list of all the RSS content you have subscribed to, and 'popular feeds' displays the most popular subscriptions in the system (a great way to quickly see which feeds are popular).

[edit] Keeping track of Elgg content

Subscribed feeds don't have to come from outside the Elgg system. Elgg provides RSS feeds for user activity, weblog posts and file uploads; it's easy to keep track of a user's file additions, for example, simply by subscribing to their files RSS feed.

[edit] User RSS feeds are linked to in three places:

  1. Their 'about me' page, next to their icon (this is the RSS feed for all activity, both weblog posts and profile details)
  2. Next to the link to their weblog (this contains weblog posts only)
  3. Next to the link to their file repository (this contains file uploads only)

Elgg also provides RSS feeds for tag-based searches, either per-user or throughout the system. This means that you could subscribe solely to files uploaded by a particular user with the tag 'podcast', or files uploaded by everyone marked with the same. The system-wide tag-based RSS feeds also let you keep track of users or communities that list particular tags in their profile fields, so you could subscribe to a feed that would let you know about new users interested in 'podcasting', or who lived in the same town as you.

[edit] What has an RSS feed in Elgg?

  • Each user has an RSS feed for all of their activity
  • Each tag has an RSS feed
  • There is an RSS feed for user files
  • There is an RSS feed for user blog posts
  • Each community has RSS feeds for files, blog posts, tags and the whole community
  • RSS feeds are produced when you search on a topic, to allow you to keep track of all activity which occurs in Elgg that gets tagged with a particular keyword ('eportfolios' for example)

[edit] To find a per-person tag-based RSS feed:

  1. Click on the tag you want to keep track of from a weblog post or file that they have published
  2. Under the search results, a link will appear: [ RSS feed for weblog posts by user in category 'tag' ], or [ RSS feed for files owned by user in category 'tag' ]. These are that user's tag-specific RSS feeds for weblog posts and files respectively.

[edit] To find a system-wide tag-based RSS feed:

  1. Either type the tag of your choice in the search box or click on it from anywhere you see it in the system.
  2. The link 'RSS feed for this tag' appears at the bottom of the screen. This is a link to the system-wide tag-based feed.

Note: RSS feeds just list content which is marked as public.

[edit] External content

Highlighting your content from other services (and importing from other blogging tools)

If your external subscriptions are your own content, you can ask Elgg to post any new items from your feeds to your main blog. When the RSS feed is brought into Elgg and published to your blog, content will appear the next time you update the source.

For example, this functionality allows you to maintain your blog on Wordpress and have the content post within your Elgg community.

To do this:

  1. Select the submenu option 'publish to blog'
  2. Check the feed you wish to import into your Elgg blog
  3. Click update