People Are Writing!
For a while now, I've been looking to find a way to aggregate blog posts from tester friends and present them here on All Things Quality.
The Blogger service hosting my blog provides a Blog List "widget" that gives me something close to what I was looking for. The problem is that widgets are restricted to a few particular portions of each page. I have a long list of testers I wanted to aggregate, and I didn't want to make every page extremely long.
After some experimentation, I hit upon a solution. I was able to create a second blog that basically contains nothing but this one widget. That way, I could make the widget area cover the width of the page, be as long as needed, yet not impact every single post on the primary blog. I used the same overall colors and formatting as my original blog, and included links to make it look as seamless as I could manage.
If you click on the tab for What People Are Writing above, you'll see the result. I like the way it came out. This aggregation shows snippets from the most recent article of each per blog, ordered by the date of the post. I think this will be an easy way to keep up with all the excellent blog posts that people in test are writing. copyrightjoestrazzere
Please let me know what you think.
And in particular, let me know if there are any other really good testers' blogs that I've missed.
This article originally appeared in my blog: All Things Quality
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My name is Joe Strazzere and I'm currently a Director of Quality Assurance. I like to lead, to test, and occasionally to write about leading and testing. Find me at http://strazzere.blogspot.com/. |
One limitation of "What People Are Writing" page, is that it's harder for us as visitors to track which posts we have already read, and to mark items we wish to return to, or forward the items to friends.
ReplyDeleteAs opposed to reading these from RSS feed through MS-Outlook for instance.
Another issue I have yet to find solution for, is how to build further discussion over these posts.
For some reason (probably the due to privately owning), people find it less inviting to build a discussion within blogs.
So I am looking for a way to insert the RSS feeds directly into a forum, and build the discussion there.
Kobi Halperin
My 2 most favorite Testing RSS aggregators are:
ReplyDelete1. SQA Planet
2. SoftwareTesters via Rosie Sherry STC
These are mostly parallel and contain useful sites, so combining them together and just building the delta over them could be useful.
In addition, there are some less active feeds such as Topsy Testing Tips and Checklists, Testing Podcasts (but I prefer reading or viewing video over podcasts) and so on.
Thanks for the feedback, Kobi!
ReplyDeleteThe "What People Are Writing" page is more of an aggregation of the most recent posts from very smart people, rather than a comprehensive list of all they have written. I use this page to see the summaries, and click into the author's blog for further reading when I find something interesting.
Certainly each of these blogs has an RSS feed that you could use with a tool like Google Reader or such if you want to see everything that has been written by that author in one place.
For further discussions about their posts, I think it's best to go to the author's blog/website and comment there, rather than commenting somewhere else that the author may never see. If they don't permit comments when I want to leave one, I usually contact the author via email, and ask why.