A Tech Tool with a Genealogical Society Twist

Alright, I’ll admit it, I’m only posting this to test a tool.

First, a little background information.

I’ve been working on upgrading the bouldergenealogy.org website for the last few months. It was sitting back in the html language that seems ancient at this point. Now it’s catching up with the rest of the internet using a platform called “wordpress” which I’m sure many of you have heard of. The main point of wordpress is as a blogging tool however, it can also make great websites with lots of flexibility and features.

Now, that’s not the tool I’m talking about here…hang tight, we’ll get there.

Some folks have mentioned getting our society into blogging. And, as many people know, blogging is the #1 way to drive traffic to your site. The more content that gets added over time the more search opportunities exist. This is also true for creating followers, and essentially members to pay for services, subscriptions and feature sets.

This is great, except for how to designate who is to keep up with the blog, how to grant people access, what is should include etc. etc. There are already a number of BGS members who have their own independent genealogy blog already. So this got my gears turning and I figure, if there’s a way to set it up so the blog at bouldergenealogy.org was actually a single blog that posts everybody else’s blogs then it would be less work for members, people who enjoy blogging won’t have to do anything differently and as a bonus, we’re more connected with our members and their research.

So, how to do this?

I’ve already been familiar with a little site called ifttt.com. That stands for, “If THIS then THAT”. At it’s basic level this is a logic recipe site. You determine what the trigger or “THIS” is which activates an action or “THAT”. So, I figure I can do this to simply say, if there’s a post on Susan’s wordpress blog then post it on the society’s website. Unfortunately, you program each “channel” and there can only be one set of credentials in the wordpress “channel”.

Hmmm…I thought. There must be a workaround or some other way to get this desired effect. Rss channel? Well, it couldn’t hurt to try it.

So, I made what IFTTT.com calls a ‘recipe’ which basically goes like this.

IFTTT

IF my rss feed gets a hit (aka, if I post something on this blog), THEN that post will be posted on the society’s blog.

So, this is my test. I’ll post a follow-up shortly.

from The webtrees Genealogist http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheWebtreesGenealogist/~3/EzRArc4m8fw/
via IFTTT