Life-Long-Learners

Purpose
This somewhat technical post is a detailed account of the steps that I went through as I attempted to create a feed from my personal WordPress blog to be aggregated into the DS106 learning community. My hope is that I will be able to save other DS106 participants time and effort if they should encounter similar problems.

Background
Two years ago, I purchased my own domain and created my WordPress-driven “Life-Long-Learners.com” blog. Early in my blogging experience, I used the FeedBurner services to help readers view my posts by RSS link or through email. I do recall that I struggled to understand the feed process when I activated my FeedBurner plugin about 22 months ago. However, it seemed to be working fine, so I promptly forgot about the technical details and concentrated on sharing K-12 educational activities, ideas and resources with my readers.

DS106 Enrollment
Prior to signing up for the DS106 MOOC (massive, open online course), I had learned that an important part of the DS106 educational experience was for all participants to create/operate their own blog. Assignments, details and reflections about their learning experience are to be posted and a tagging or labeling strategy is to be implemented so that all DS106-related posts can be automatically transferred, aggregated and shared with all DS106 participants.

Following up on Jim Groom’s (aka @Reverend’s) posted “Invitation”, I signed up for DS106 on December 26. I filled in the online form indicating that I was hoping to enroll, for free, as an “open online student” and then added my email address and the URL address of my personal blog where I intended to post my assignments. The very next day the “Reverend” sent me a welcome DS106 web message (and its duplicate by email) and followed up later with the following:

One more thing, I am pulling in the url http://life-long-learners.com/tag/ds106/feed so that any post you tag ds106 will automatically syndicate in here. Let me know if this works for you.

To that end let me ask you, you have feedburner on your site, right? Can you see how I can grab feeds of the ds106 tag? When I try now they just redirect me to the main blog feed. Here is the URL I usually grab for the straight up WP feed:http://life-long-learners.com/tag/ds106/feed/

My Blog Feed Problem
The problem that seemed to be happening was that my blog feed to the DS106 aggregator software was not filtering posts properly. In other words, all my posts were being sent to the aggregator rather than only those that were tagged or labeled “DS106”. Although I had been using “FeedBurner Feedsmith” as a plugin mechanism to transfer blog posts through RSS or email to my blog reading members, it did not seem to be filtering or discriminating between a blog post for Grade 3 teachers entitled “Egyptian Hieroglyphics Add Interest” and the DS106-tagged post “DS106 – My new learning adventure!” In other words, everything that I published on my blog was being forwarded to the DS106 aggregator.

To test the FeedBurner extraction process, on December 26^th, I wrote four test posts such as:

DS106 – Sample A – Test 1
Hi … I apologize if you are emailed this “update” by mistake. I am trying to configure future blog posts so that they integrate with the Digital Storytelling (DS106) online course that I plan to take in January.
Please ignore this post which I am using to test the system.
THANKS for your understanding … Brian

On two of these test posts, I labeled or tagged them with “DS106”, hoping that they would be extracted and aggregated properly. On the remaining two, I used non-Ds106 tags, pretending that such posts were designed only to be read by my blog’s faithful readers and not to be shared with my DS106 community of learners. I felt that it was important that an apologetic test post be created in case my regular readers thought were getting spammed as I tried to improve on the DS106 discrimination features of FeedBurner.

Risk-taking through “trial and terror”
My troubleshooting began with the examination of my current FeedBurner plugin. I was using the WordPress plugin called “FeedBurner FeedSmith” for the past 22 months. I visited this plugin site and although it was updated just last month, it did not specifically mention that it had the capability of filtering feeds based on specific tags or labels. During my search for “FeedBurner FeedSmith”, the Google drop down list box advised me that I could also investigate “feedburner feedsmith extend”. Thinking that this might add more functionality to my current FeedBurner plugin, I visited this WordPress plugin page and found that the creator, Jiayu (James) Ji, indicated “I enhanced it base on the FeedBurner FeedSmith and now it can redirects feeds for category and tag also.” This sounded like the improvement I needed. So I installed it and activated it using the WordPress “Plugins” screen. However, since I had not configured a FeedBurner-related plugin for almost two years, I unfortunately forgot that it was necessary to also “tweak” this plugin using the WordPress “Settings => plugin” screen. In hind-sight, I look back and think … how stupid … how did I think the FeedBurner process would work without activating some setting to help filter out posts containing “DS106” tags? So naturally, Jim Groom and his patient team were getting all my posts as opposed to only those containing the designated “DS106” tag.

Next Jim sent me the following message:

@audrey gave me this feed for her blog which is also using feedburner, you might want to let me know if that works for you as well

http://feeds.feedburner.com/HackEducation_ds106

Not sure how she got this, but I have been having some difficulty finding tag feeds through FeedBurner

With this DS106 web message (and its duplicate email), Jim shared a technique that Audrey Waters (@audrey) used. Based on this information, I concluded that if the FeedBurner extraction was working properly then:

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/life-long-learners_ds106 should provide only “DS106” tagged posts whereas:
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/life-long-learners should list all posts regardless of tags.

Unfortunately, when I entered both of the above URL addresses in my browser, both feeds listed all posts that were in my blog regardless of how they were tagged. So in my mind, the filtering system was not working.

The Teachable Moment
It was the following direct DS106 web message from Audrey Waters (together with its duplicate email) that got me started along the path to success:

Here’s my “trick” — I use the FD-Feedburner plugin for WP. It gives me the option (under settings) to “Append category/tag to URL for category/tag feeds (http://url_category).” I took this URL, http://hackeducation.com/?feed=rss2&tag=ds106 and I burned a new feedburner feed from that. Hope that helps.

Following up on her web message, I decided to download the alternate WordPress plugin “FD-Feedburner” that Audrey recommended. I installed it and I must admit that I was reluctant to “deactivate” my old “FeedBurner Feedsmith” plugin, which had faithfully served my readers for almost two years. Although I wanted to be a part of the DS106 experience, I can assure you that at 2:30 a.m. (in the wee small hours of the night), I started to weigh the need for the DS106 community to get my filtered posts against the possibility of inadvertently cutting off my readers who had subscribed to my post feeds through a different software plugin. Perhaps, I would only “deactivate” my older plugin and not actually delete it at this time … thinking, I hoped, that if this new “FD-Feedburner” plugin did not filter my DS106 tags, I could always return to my earlier plugin (with hopefully no critical repercussions.)

In her rather short web message, Audrey provided me with the following two key ideas:

1. First, it was Audrey’s “three little words” that restored faith in the mind of this DS106 “newbie”. Her three words … “option (under settings)” … awakened me to the fact that blog users had to not only install a FeedBurner plugin, they also had to go to the Settings => Feedburner screen and activate the software to extract blog post by a specific tag. By placing a checkmark in front of “Append category/tag to URL for category/tag feeds (http://url_category)”, I configured the FD-Feedburner plugin to extract any posts labeled or tagged with the “DS106”entity. Now any posts in my blog could be filtered on the tag “DS106”.
2. Secondly, Audrey provided me with the magic URL that I could modify and insert in the FeedBurner web site to route the above filtered test blog posts to the aggregator software for sharing amongst the DS106 learning community.

Read the “Fine Print”
With the FD-Feedburner plugin activated and configured in the WordPress “Settings” area, I eagerly proceeded to the FeedBurner web site to burn a feed using Audrey’s key URL.

I reviewed Audrey’s email message which I had printed out for reference:

Audrey Waters replied to one of your updates:

"Here's my "trick" -- I use the FD-Feedburner plugin for WP.
It gives me the option (under settings) to "Append category/tag
to URL for category/tag feed(http://url_category)."  I took this
URL, http://hackeducation.com/?feed=rss2&tag=ds106 and
I burned a new feedburner feed from that.  Hope that helps."

To view your original update and all comments, log in
and visit: http://ds106.us/activity/p/7396/

Armed with this important URL string, I logged into Google Feedburner. I modified Audrey’s blog feed address to my own blog and entered “http://life-long-learners.com/?feed=rss2&tag=ds106” (without quotes) into the feed address field as shown below:

I checked with Tim Owens (@timmmmyboy) who promptly advised me that I did not have to check the box in front of “I am a podcaster” to fulfill any of the current DS106 assignments.

I clicked the “Next” button and was informed that my blog feed address had been verified. I next changed the “Feed Title” from its current “Life-Long-learners” to “DS106tags” (since I already had a “Life-Long-Learners” feed to which my blog readers had previously subscribed).  At the bottom of this display, I was informed, through a rather confusing URL display, that my new DS106-tagged feeds would be accessed through a combination of:

The permanent first part of the address “http://feeds.feedburner.com/” combined with the unique, auto-generated, last portion “life-long-learners/gIrj”

Upon clicking on the “Next” button, a “congratulatory” message helped clarify the previous confusion, indicating that I could subscribe and share this feed with others through this concatenated web address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/life-long-learners/gIrj

Although the FeedBurner application suggested that I could add additional features to my feed, I was eager to exit FeedBurner and try out my new DS106-tagged feed.

As indicated earlier, on the day following Christmas, I had created four short test posts in my personal blog. Two test posts were purposely tagged with “DS106” and the remaining two posts were labeled with other non-DS106 labels. These test posts would help me differentiate if my newly-constructed FeedBurner feed would filter out the subset of all my posts and forward only those two “DS106” labeled or tagged posts to the DS106 community.

Imagine, my disappointment, when I entered my new FeedBurner feed address http://feeds.feedburner.com/life-long-learners/gIrj into my browser and examined the resulting “extracted” list of posts. I was expecting to see a rather short list of only the two, DS106-tagged, test posts. Unfortunately, what was displayed was a comparatively long list of 11 posts entries. Not only were my two, December 26^th created, DS106-tagged test posts listed, so were the remaining two non-DS106 test posts together with an additional seven regular blog posts which had been written as far back as November 17^th. I was convinced that this new, improved FD-Feedburner plugin was failing to filter out DS-tagged posts, just as my original plugin failed to do. I did some important comparison testing of the blog posts displayed with this new DS106 extraction feed against the list of posts produced by my original FeedBurner feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/life-long-learners which was created 22 months ago to help my blog readers subscribe to my blog posts. Guess what? When each of these FeedBurner URLs was entered into my browser, both post listings were exact! I was hoping the DS106 feed would produce a shorter list of only my two test blog entries but it had the exact same extended list containing all 11 posts.

My next thought was that perhaps my DS106-tagged filter has not been activated yet. I searched through a series of articles on how Feedburner was supposed to perform and found a resource called Ping FeedBurner.  By entering my Life-Long-Learners.com DS106 feed address into Ping FeedBurner, any new changes, such as my new blog test posts, would be updated immediately rather than having to wait for the usual 30 minute update interval. Assuming this was the case, I “pinged” my web site and eagerly returned to view my tagged-feed to see if the former list of eleven was shorter hoping that my newly-created feed would extract only the two test posts that I had purposely tagged with “DS106”.  No … that was not the case … all eleven posts were displayed in my newly created feed, even after I had requested that the feed be updated using my new found “Ping” activator.

I spent hours trying to rectify this supposedly failing feed. I finally searched with Google for “DS106 feeds” and found the “Reverend’s” “bavatuesdays” blog with the post entitled “Tag feeds for a variety of Blogging Platforms”. Jim’s WordPress entry recommended the DS106 tag feed as:

http://www.example.com/?tag=ds106&feed=rss2

I compared this tag feed with the one that appeared in Audrey’s email to me:

http://hackeducation.com/?feed=rss2&tag=ds106

I immediately noticed that the feed and tag parameters were reversed, but more importantly, there was an an extra “&amp” HTML entry in Audrey’s emailed tag feed string. Could the four little characters in “&amp” prevent my filtering feed from working? I removed these four characters and returned to Google Feedburner where I created a new feed using the shorter tag feed. Next, I went to Ping FeedBurner to instruct that the feeds be updated immediately. I then checked my newly generated live FeedBurner feed-list.

Success!

Only my two test posts, which were tagged or labeled with the “DS106” qualifier, were displayed. All my other posts, which were created for my regular blog readers and were tagged or labeled with other non-DS106 entries, were “nowhere to be seen”.

Following on this success, I immediately sent off an email to both Jim Groom and Audrey Waters advising them that I believed that my DS106-tagged posts were now being filtered correctly. Jim promptly confirmed that he was seeing only my short list of test blog posts and that my DS106 feed was finally working as intended.

Once I knew that my DS106-tagged feed system was working properly, I went back to my “Life-Long-Learners.com” blog and deleted the test posts, as there was no need for new subscribers to view these trouble-shooting components. However, I noticed that when I logged on to the DS106 web site and examined my filtered posts, even though I had deleted them from my blog, copies of my DS106-tagged test posts were still displayed as “ghosts” since they had been transferred prior to my deleting their corresponding originals from my blog.

I finally felt that things were working when I wrote and posted the following three additional new posts

• Comment Characteristics & Communications  on Dec 28^th and tagged with “DS106”
• DS106 will make my learning transparent! on Jan 3^rd and tagged with “DS106”
• Egyptian Hieroglyphics Add Interest  on Jan 4^th without any “DS106” tag

When I logged on to the DS106 web site, I was delighted to see that the FeedBurner filter system was working properly and that only the above top, two posts were displayed and there was no reference to “Egyptian Hieroglyphics”.

Although this FeedBurner filter problem took me several hours to rectify, I admit in hindsight that it did help me hone my trouble-shooting skills. Furthermore, this struggle reinforced just how important it is for one to be able to network with supportive individuals like Jim Groom, Audrey Waters, and Tim Owens.

What caused this “hiccup”?
I must admit that I do not know specifically what caused this hiccup. However, I do have a theory. On my computer, I still use the Windows XP operating system and Outlook 2003 as my e-mail client. My e-mail configuration is normally set to HTML so that specific fonts and hyperlinks are active within it. It appears that when Audrey’s e-mail first arrived, it was in standard Courier-style text format and proper conversion to HTML at that time failed and the “&amp” was inserted. Thankfully, I kept a printout of this “enhanced” text-formatted message for reference because when I recently returned to read Audrey’s e-mail message, I found that it had now been converted to proper HTML and the “&amp” was no longer part of the FeedBurner string.

Perhaps some of my readers, who are more conversant with Outlook and HTML, can explain how this FeedBurner string was modified in my incoming e-mail. I certainly know that Audrey is not at fault in any way. If I had chosen to modify the information that Audrey sent in her corresponding web message, this problem would not have occurred because her web message string did not include this offending “&amp” HTML code.

Thus it appears that my existing feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/life-long-learners), which has been supplying RSS and email updates to my blog readers for 22 months, was working fine. However, any tag-extraction modification or extension to the above address, which does not precisely meet the FeedBurner protocol, will cause the filter to fail. Such filter failure results in all posts of a blog being delivered as opposed to only the subset tagged or labeled with “DS106”.

Summary
To help others DS106 participants, who may struggle with having their blog posts filtered appropriately with FeedBurner, I recommend the following steps:

1. Install an appropriate blog plugin which can filter posts by tags or labels. Thanks to Audrey Waters, I can recommend FD-FeedBurner as a reliable WordPress plugin.
2. Make certain to modify or change the plugin settings so as to extract “DS106” tags. Be aware that some blog platforms treat the particular tag or label as case sensitive. In other words, if you have configured your plugin to extract “ds106” tags and you tag or label the post with uppercase letters such as “DS106”, the particular post will not be extracted for syndication.
3. Burn an appropriate feed at FeedBurner.
4. Share the generated feed string URL with Jim Groom and his DS106 Tech Support team.
5. Write two or three short test posts (with and without DS106 tags) and publish them to your blog.
6. Enter your blog address in Ping FeedBurner to facilitate the quick filter process.
7. Examine your FeedBurner feed to see if the extraction filter selected only the DS106-tagged posts.
8. When you are satisfied that the DS106-tagged posts are being extracted, verify this with the DS106 Tech Support team.
9. Most importantly, share your successes and failures, with others in the DS106 learning community, so that we can all benefit.

Take care & keep smiling

Image Credits:
- D’Arcy Normand‘s DS106 Skull & Crossbones logo from:
“Crowdsourcing assignments for ds106” by Jim Groom aka “Reverend” at:
http://bavatuesdays.com/crowdsourcing-assignments-for-ds106/
- Google FeedBurner screen capture from: http://feedburner.google.com

The purpose of this post is to advise my readers of an important writing style transition in some of my upcoming blog posts. In past, I have struggled “behind the scenes” drafting, editing, and proof-reading each blog post before I felt it was “ready for prime time” and could finally be published. Perhaps some might say that the published posts or articles were finally “polished” (albeit too long, which is a curse that I continue to struggle with).

Perhaps my “polished” blog posts are similar to the traditional “polished” appearance that many teachers display in their classrooms. For example, have your students ever asked you a question about the subject matter that you teach and failed to get a correct answer? Do you ever make mistakes in front of your students and acknowledge such errors? In other words do your students think that you know “everything”? Are you “too polished”? Perhaps we, as teachers, need to be more transparent in our learning.

I must admit that when I first taught Grade 7 & 8 Mathematics, I prided myself on the fact that no students could ask me a math-related question or problem that I could not solve or explain how I arrived at the correct answer. Furthermore I, somewhat naively, thought that all students arrived at the correct answer following the same algorithm or process-path that I used. It was not until I started teaching Computer Science that I realized that there were many different ways to write a computer program albeit some were more efficient than others. However, it was the diversity of student programming solutions that started me to appreciate the variety and ingenuity in my students’ creative thinking. It was then that I started engaging in what I will call “transparent problem solving” with my students. I would often share a puzzle or problem and have students work in pairs or triads to come up with a solution. Knowing there were a variety of ways to solve such problems, I wanted the participants in small groups to learn that their colleagues perhaps didn’t approach the problem or its solution in the same way they did. Furthermore, I started asking students to verbalize or think “out loud” so that others could appreciate and learn to solve problems in different ways. I recently shared with my readers one of my favourite problems in an earlier post entitled “Problem Solving: Where does the ‘F’ go?“.

“DS106″ tag is the key
In a recent post, I stated that I have enrolled in a free, 15 week digital storytelling MOOC (massive, open online course) known as DS106. Participants are expected to engage in the learning process through reaction, reflection and construction of creative assignments. One of the most critical parts of the entire learning process is for participants to document their ideas and struggles as they work through this online course. These reflections and solutions are to be shared on one’s blog. So readers of my blog are going to be exposed to additional posts where I document my DS106 learning journey in a much more transparent manner. Such DS106-related posts will have a “DS106″ tag displayed at the bottom of the post (as illustrated below). For example, my last post on January 4th, in which I shared information about the “hieroglyphic typewriter”, was created for my traditional audience of K-12 educators. As such, there was no “DS106″ included in the seven tags associated with this post. On the other hand, the January 3rd post describing “My new learning adventure” included “DS106″ as the third tag at the bottom. The news aggregator software, used by the facilitators of the DS106 course, simply scans all the blogs of all student participants in this course. Only those articles or posts that include the “DS106″ tag will be filtered and shared within the community of learners at Mary Washington University which facilitates the DS106 online course

I encourage readers of my blog to peruse all my posts but if some future content seems to be somewhat unusual or different from my standard format, I trust that the post will have a “DS106″ tag associated with it.

So please consider this to be fair warning faithful reader. Some of my upcoming posts may be somewhat technical (as my next DS106 post); a few may expose my frustration or difficulties that I encounter; some may be quite reflective; while hopefully others may share my successes. However, I can assure you that some of my future blog posts will, like a diary, become somewhat personal. No doubt you will see me with less polish and more tarnish, as you witness and share my transparent DS106 learning journey.

Take care & keep smiling

Credits:
-   Flickr – Creative Commons image
“When we make our learning transparent, we become teachers”
by langwitches – http://www.flickr.com/photos/langwitches/3500044331/

How can blog tagging help educators? To answer this general question, I will examine a specific situation which educators in the province of Manitoba must consider.

Literacy with Information and Communication Technology (LwICT) is a provincial-wide mandate for all K-8 teachers throughout Manitoba. Many excellent resources, which support this initiative, can be found on the Literacy with Information and Communication Technology website.

This developmental continuum, which utilizes an inquiry-based model, is based on the following nine “Big Ideas”:

1. Plan and Question
2. Gather and Make Sense
3. Produce to Show Understanding
4. Communicate
5. Reflect
6. Ethics and Responsibility
7. Collaboration
8. Motivation and Condfidence
9. Social Implications

There is an expectation that all K-8 teachers will report to parents, regarding their child’s competency, in the following three areas:

• demonstrate critical thinking with ICT to plan and gather information
• demonstrate creative thinking with ICT to produce and communicate information
• demonstrate responsibility and ethics with ICT

To gain a better perspective, I encourage readers to view the following developmental continuum poster, entitled Literacy with ICT Across the Curriculum. Not only will one observe the nine “Big Ideas”, grouped along the vertical axis, within their Cognitive and Affective domains but one can also see the three stages of thinking as one progresses across the chart on the horizontal axis.

However, the purpose of this blog entry is to focus on the 62 individual descriptors which teachers may use as reference points to gauge student progress through the LwICT continuum. Each unique descriptor combination is composed of letters and number codes. The letter codes refer to one of the “Big Ideas” while the decimal number identifies one of the three thinking stages and the decimal portion points to the specific descriptor’s location. For example, three descriptors from “Produce to Show Understanding”, “Ethics and Responsibility” and the “Reflect” “Big Ideas” are listed below in order of the respective three levels of thinking:

Pr1.2  – composes texts, records sound, sketches images, graphs data, and/or creates video

E2.4 – applies guidelines for ethical and responsible use of ICT

R3.1 – self-monitors learning goals, reflects on the value of ICT to complete learning tasks, and sets personal goals for using ICT to learn

Based on this brief background regarding LwICT,  how can a specific blog tagging initiative help Manitoba educators? Today, with so much sharing of educational resources on the Internet, educators need ways to quickly extract relevant ideas and resources to improve learning in their classrooms. This need is even more urgent  for K-8 teachers in Manitoba. Imagine the time saving and benefit, if teachers could search the Internet and narrow in on applicable classroom resources using the LwICT descriptor?

To assist this process, I will begin tagging my blog entries with applicable LwICT descriptor codes. I would hope that other Manitoba educators will also use this same blog tagging technique to help our colleagues more easily locate and extract resources to benefit the students on their learning journey through LwICT. Won’t you consider helping out in this manner?

Take care & keep smiling

Do you want to learn time-saving techniques to help you find information of interest on our Life-Long-Learners.com blog? In this post, I will share three research strategies, which are identified in order of extraction precision from the broader to the more specific need.  These three strategies involve the use of categories, tags, and the search function.

Categories
Whenever a blog entry is created and published, the author can provide one, or more, broad  category descriptions which are displayed on the left, immediately below the entry title. If you look above, you will see that this particular entry has been classified under the “How To” and “Tutorial” categories. To utilize this tool to conduct research, one should select a category of interest from the “L-L-L Categories” list in the narrow, right column. If, for example, the reader chooses to select the category “LwICT”, then all blog entries/articles which were categorized with this “Literacy with Information and Communication Technology” (LwICT) identifier, will automatically be extracted and displayed for the reader to peruse.

Tags
At one time, categories were the only way in which the blogger could systematically sub-divide post entries into different groups. Unfortunately, as bloggers tried to more accurately describe their entries or posts, the category list became much larger and too unmanageable.  So tags were created to allow the blogger to provide additional identifiers that descibed each post in more specific detail. Generally, most posts have fewer categories than tags. For example, a blog post with a title of “2010 is a New Year” might have categories of “Olympics” and “resolutions” with an alphabetical tag list of “figure skating”, “help around house”, “lose weight”, “Men’s downhill”, “walk dog”, “Vancouver”, and “Whistler”.  In our Life-Long-Learners.com blog, the tags are located at the end of each post, after my traditional tag line, and are listed with pipe (|) separators. In this specific entry, the tags listed in alphabetical order at the bottom of this article are “categories”, “research”, “search”, “tag cloud” and “tags”. In addition, if the reader clicks on any particular tag entry, for example the “search” tag, all blog entries that utilize “research”, as a tag, are automatically extracted so the reader ca investigate like-tagged blog entries.

In this blog, the reader can also use the animated “L-L-L Tag Cloud” in the right column to help extract all blog posts identified by a specific tag descriptor. Tag clouds are a pictorial representation in which the size of the font, of each hyper-linked tag, is directly proportional to the frequency of use. In order words, the more popular the tag, the larger its font. The researcher should move the mouse over the “L-L-L Tag Cloud” in the right column to start the animation and then click on a hyper-link tag of interest. For example, if one clicked in the tag “21st century learners”, then all blog posts which were identified by this tag would be extracted for viewing.

Search
The “Search L-L-L Blog” function, at the top of the right column, is the tool that helps one find any textual references throughout the entire blog. This tool is my favourite as it can select posts that contain certain words that may not have been included as  a “category” or “tag”. Furthermore , this “Search” mechanism will extract blogs containing multiple words. For example, if one enters “Creative Commons Flickr” (without quotes) in the search field, all blog entries that contain Flickr and the  Creative Commons terms will be extracted for perusal. Although only the initial  portion of the relevant articles are displayed, one can click on each hyper-linked title to display the corresponding entire post.

Hopefully, the reader will now be able to find blog entries of interest in a more efficient manner by using the categories, tags and search functions.

Take care & keep smiling

Credit: Flickr image “Magnifying” by Clover_1
http://www.flickr.com/photos/clover_1/3433081165/