If you’re a faculty member using the FeedWordPress plugin to syndicate (aggregate) your student blogs into a courseblog, you may occasionally experience errors with regard to blog and category feeds, or encounter situations where a blogger’s content is simply not showing up on the motherblog at all. Here’s a very common error you might see in the FeedWordPress admin page while attempting to add a blog feed:
This particular error often means that the blog you are attempting to syndicate has privacy settings enabled. Unfortunately, the breed of motherblog that relies on remote syndication of content will not work if the sites it is attempting to syndicate are not fully open to the web. In any case, if you experience this error–or others like it–visit with your students to 1). ask whether they have privacy controls enabled or 2). whether they’ve just categorized something incorrectly (in order for category feed URLs to sync properly, the remote bloggers must be categorizing their posts properly).
If your students are electing to blog privately, please see our recommendations for managing privacy in courseblogs. There are ways to have a fully open courseblog and still let individual students contribute private posts that are only visible to the blog admin.