Extending Your SDL Community Reach with Some QueryString Parameters

The SDL Community site is up, but only 25 of my posts were displaying.

If you're on Blogger and want to see more of your posts, try:
/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss&max-results=999

Too add the missing 200 or so posts to the site I added a max limit parameters to my feed and then changed it to RSS. I Blogger through Feedburner, but you can use a different service.

464 is a lot of blog posts, but if that included my posts, it mean I've contributed half of the feed. Hmmm...

I've been using Feedburner, an (aging?) Google service that lets you automatically generate other formats including HTML, Atom, and RSS. Here you can see my Feedburner only showing posts back to 2014. I've been blogging about Tridion since 2011.

I updated Blogger to show more (and start after 2011). Blogger, by default has an Atom feed like:
http://www.createandbreak.net/feeds/posts/default

Bart Koopman explained there's also an RSS option, which the community site needs, with:
http://www.createandbreak.net/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

I did more "research" (Googling) to find the parameters for start and max, along with the RSS option so it now looked like:
http://www.createandbreak.net/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss&max-results=999&published-min=2011-01-01T00:00:00

This was impossible to test until I disconnected the Feedburner setting (below) in Blogger.

I could confirm the blogger feed querystring parameters worked when I removed the Post Feed Redirect URL.

I then updated Feedburner's output RSS 1.0.


So to get your content indexed by the community site and you're hitting the 25 post limit in Blogger, you have two options:

1. With Feedburner and your Post Feed Redirect URL, modify your feed and then set it to RSS 1.0:
   /feeds/posts/default?alt=rss&max-results=999
2. Alternatively, turn off Feedburner and give a community manager (Bart Koopman) your manual feed URL instead.

As a side effect of troubleshooting this scenario, Bart was able to add other feeds to the community site (hence the burst of recent posts from StackExchange).

By the way, you can tell I was in the Netherlands for this post from the references I found on Blogger's feed parameters:

• http://too-clever-by-half.blogspot.nl/2011/12/blog-feed-500-post-limit-for-more-than.html
• http://freshblogtemplates-3.blogspot.nl

Note: I've read that Feedburner might be shutting down. See alternatives in this post, the main thing is that the SDL Community aggregator uses RSS and if you'd like to be added or even removed, leave a quick post.

If you want to bypass the feeds and be featured directly on SDL Community section for Tridion, please sign up. I've promoted and "sold" TridionWorld before and looking back at my contribution to the Tridion blogosphere, I still have some vested interest to promote the site and your content.

I think that includes my posts now give or take a few.

Assuming they're all in there, my 253 posts out of  694 means I've contributed 36% of the feed as of now (I'm not quite sure because 694 now - 464 before + 25 already-included = 255). With this additional post, maybe you can add your older posts as well.

Inline vs. In-Context Editing

Inline editing simply means the ability to update your content in the context of the page its on. Interfaces like SDL Tridion’s Experience Manager give authors the ability to click and start typing to make changes  which might be impressive (or not). But the strongest feature is being able to find your pages with a navigation you’re familiar with and edit content in the context of its surrounding  content.

If you notice, even blogging tools like Blogger don’t do complete inline editing. If logged in to Google, I can however, click the icon to jump to a form view.

I'm one pencil click away from editing this post.

Blogger has drag-and-drop layout, but it’s in a clean, easy-to-follow interface, independent of your template.

Step-By-Step Blogging Guide

Not everyone has the time or inclination to learn and search for everything you need to start a blog. So here are some the practical steps to get started with Blogspot (Google's Blogger).

Some Clicks and Some Text

Starting a blog is ridiculously simple. The hardest part is giving yourself permission to create something. Let me know if you need help with that part, but otherwise skim over this and choose your platform (Blogger or Wordpress are good places to start, I've used both).

Go to http://blogger.com.

How to add a personalized favicon (favorite icon) to your Blogger blog

How to add a personalized favicon (favorite icon) to your Blogger blog

I'm looking to create a nice little createandbreak icon for this blog. Maybe a little hammer icon or a screw driver perhaps. I'll start with just a hammer. I tried a screw-driver crossing a hammer, but that looked too much like an icon for "tools and options." That and it's hard to manually do the anti-aliasing by hand (okay not too hard, just time-consuming).

I made the following with paint shop pro (version 8.10, mind you) just drawing around in the bitmap of a 16x16 256 colored image. I did use one of their preset gradients, but besides that, it's all me!

Not super cool just yet, but I'll keep at it. At least it's my very own icon. (You can even tell by searching for "hammer icon" and seeing the definitely more professional icons out there)

Here it is in-action in Firefox (2):


Not showing up in IE7 yet-possibly because it's the wrong format (gif instead of .ico). I set it as a favorite, but maybe it takes something else to make it work.

The fun things about bitmaps is the illusion anti-aliasing does.

Maybe I can pick better color-choices, but look at how "crude" the actual pixels look zoomed in.



I picked up this drawing "skill" back when I tried to make bitmaps of the USS Enterprise using just MS Paint. I found that filling in the corners with differing shades of grays and colors made that blending effect. So instead of jagged lines, we get nice anti-aliased diagonals and curves. Basically brightered colors seem to be bigger while darker colors seemed to make things shrink.

It kind of blew me away the first time I saw a program do such lines in real-time. If it wasn't for old school MS Paint and other basic draw programs, we'd take it for granted that angled lines just look "normal."

Blogger Draft Features

I added the reaction feature to this blog. It's a part of blogger's draft features.

I enabled the ratings and the custom feedback options. I'll keep it on until I lament my lack of readership and/or something breaks!