It's BAAAAAAACK!

Sometimes things work out well.  Sometimes.

As one of my four readers you may be aware that I run another blog: News From the Real World.  That blog aggregates articles I think are relevant for my students.  This is the source material for the "Worth a Look" and "Vote for Comment of the Week" posts on this page.

There are two main streams for the content on that page.  One of the is the "ToDo/Alerts" folder in my email.  Through a bunch of Outlook rules that folder gathers a bunch of industry content and I winnow that for Greenpage (my shorthand for News From the Real World) content.  The other stream are articles I tag "Greenpage" in my RSS feed.  I have lost track of how many feeds I am subscribed to and which of them are pretty much exclusively for Greenpage content generation.  Anyway, articles pile up under that tag and then I winnow those into Greenpage articles.

In my present operation of 12 posts per day, 6 days per week I generally post 6 articles sourced from my RSS tag.  A quick scan of the tag shows 26 articles tagged today.  That means 20 articles that I initially thought were relevant don't make the final cut.  Often it's editorial balance that makes the difference - I just don't like the way the 12 daily posts are forming up.  Sometimes it is just volume.  If I posted everything it would be overwhelming for the students.  Sometimes I think even the 60 posts per week is overwhelming.

Back in the golden days of Google Reader (may it rest in peace) the software gave me an interesting sideline.  Tagged articles in Reader could themselves get RSS feeds.  That allowed me to have a link on the Greenpage to what I called the "Greenpage Feeder Page."  If people were so interested and wanted to see the remaining tagged articles that didn't make the 6 that got to the Greenpage each day they could check out the Feeder Page and see all of the articles.

Unfortunately that functionality was lost with the loss of that specific RSS reader.  I switched over to Feedly Reader and my process didn't change at all.  I still tag articles "Greenpage" and then select a couple of articles each day to promote to the Greenpage proper.  I could see the full list but the opportunity for readers to get access to the full tag volume wasn't available.

Until I got around to fixing that today.  Introducing the "Greenpage Source Page."

While I have been griping about this loss of functionality I have been peripherally aware of a service called If This Then That: IFTTT.  In broad terms this is a service that lets you link other internet services.  Looking through the available "recipes" I found one already written to generate a blogger post each time a Feedly article was tagged with a specific tag.  So I started a new blog, set up the IFTTT recipe and presto: new outside "Greenpage" tag access.

I need to work on some formatting issues.  Part of me thinks it will never look polished, but that is sort of in the "backstage" spirit of the thing anyway.  If you have the time and inclination you should check it out.