Front Page article in The Standard!

Today's St. Catharines Standard featured a front page article about occasional teachers, highlighting Niagara OT's own Britiny Gentry!

Generic FeedFlares for FeedBurner

When customizing the interactivity built into your blog feed using FeedBurner's FeedFlare feature, the easy way to do it is to use the GenericFeedFlare, which takes parameters:

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/variableflareunits/GenericFeedFlare.jspx?text=Some+text&link=http://www.somelink.com

Since the Creative Commons license functionality built into FeedBurner uses the CC 3.0 Unported version of the license, a good use of the generic FeedFlare is to add a CC license to my feed that uses the CC 2.5 Canada version of the license (the legalese is customized to the Canadian jurisdiction; wherever possible, use your country-specific CC license). To do this, I'd enter the following into the Add New Flare box:

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/variableflareunits/GenericFeedFlare.jspx?text=View+CC+License&link=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/

I've bolded the custom parameters above. You can change them to suit your application. In the example above, for instance, you would want to change the link to go to whichever CC license is appropriate for you (specific to your country and licensing preferences... above, I use the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives Canada license).

Promote your blog with social networking

In true Web 2.0 style, you can make it easy for your blog readers to promote your blog for you. Of course, with the abundance of social networking sites out there, how do you make sharing/bookmarking links for all of them available to your users?

The problem is solved by services like addthis.com (used on this blog) and addtoany.com, which provide a single button that can be displayed on your blog. When clicked or hovered over, the button displays a wide variety of social networking services, easily allowing your readers to choose the service of their choice on which they'd like to share a link to your blog.

Power up your blog with FeedBurner

Blogs are useful in all kinds of ways for educators, and as educators we want to teach our audiences how to access blogs in the most efficient manner, by using a feed reader such as Google Reader.

However, encouraging our audiences to subscribe to our blog feeds gives us, as content producers, the responsibility to provide a proper feed. That's where FeedBurner comes in.

FeedBurner's feeds offer the following features:
- an awesome subscribe page that works with all browsers and readers
- the option to enable e-mail subscriptions
- automatic "ping" service to notify search engines when your content has been updated
- statistics on your feed's activity
- integrated sharing of your feed with social networking sites
- integration with Google Adsense to monetize your blog

Go ahead and give FeedBurner a try. It'll make your blog more useful.