I have been working with Anthony Fontana for a little while now to figure out an issue with listing our RSS feeds in the BGSU RSS Reader Facebook app. It turned out I needed to add a RSS 2.0 template to the blogs, their app is not parsing Atom feeds.

Now with that solved, there will be more of our RSS feeds added to the app soon. This is great news for the Sports Blog and other blogs we have.

I want to thank Anthony and BGSU for including our blogs in their Facebook app.

Lara at mtvU/College Publisher asked me to write an article on how our newspaper uses YouTube for video on our site. I wrote it a couple days ago and it has since been edited and posted on the newly relaunched College Publisher site, it is called "YouTube as the Video Solution." Be sure and check it out, and let me know what you think.

Unlike most every CMS I have come across, managing the RSS feed is a chore and takes a lot of time that it should not. In order for the breadcrumb trail to work, you need to create the articles under the sub menu Pages. In our case, that would be like Sports under Our Views.

However, to get all the Sports articles to also show up in the main RSS feed, the articles have to be "copied" into the Articles tab of the root of the tree, BG Views. Click the thumbnail to the right to see the tab with a big red arrow pointing to it.

Click the Edit button, this allows you to use the Copy/Paste buttons. From the left frame click the Search tab, then Advanced. Select "latest hour" (you will be doing this right after you finish putting the articles in) then select "Saved by me" and click Search. You can now copy all the section specific articles into the main RSS feed by Copy/Paste into the Articles tab.

Campus Blotter
The Campus Blotter has a special section page at the root of the tree in the left frame. This is because you cannot hide sub menu items (which is lame). Be sure and go to the Campus Blotter Page and "copy" the blotter if you added one that day.

Once done, the section specific RSS feeds work, and the main RSS feed works, making all of our readers who love RSS (like me) happy.

As I said in my post about CP5, Movable Type has its own set of quarks. I will be using this post to document them as best as I can. This is more for my staff at The BG News, but may be useful for anyone else who is working with MT. For reference I have MT 4.24 Pro installed currently.

CP5, or Polopoly, has a lot of quarks. Hell, Movable Type has a lot of quarks. I will be using this post to document them as best as I can. This is more for my staff at The BG News, but may be useful for anyone else who is working with CP5.

For those who have access to the Movable Type back end of BG Views, there are two different text editors to chose from. We like to give you the choice, maybe you will like the one I do not. First we will go over the steps to changing the Text Editor, then we will go over the differences between the two.

Hit the jump to read the how-to.

I know that may sound like a funny title to you, but it is no laughing matter. If you use Word to compose your article, and then copy and paste into MT, depending on the option you use from Word, you can get anywhere from 10 to 300-some lines of code that is not necessary. Not only is it not necessary, some RSS readers cannot parse out that code - and them's fightin' words.

If you are not going to type directly into either the front-end or back-end text box of MT, use TextEdit on the Mac or WordPad on the PC. Seriously, do not use Microsoft Word. It really screws things up by putting in all kinds of random FONT and SPAN tags, XML that means nothing to anything but Microsoft Word.

Just don't use Word. Whatever you do.

One of the main reasons we are launching BG Views is because we don't want college media to be a one way conversation anymore. We want your feedback and your input. Our Community site is made up of Blogs, Forums, and Community Blogs. In the Community Blogs, you have the ability to participate in the writing process.

Signing up for a BG Views Network account will allow you to post articles and entries to our community blogs and forums. It has more features, with others to come, but at the root of it all is the ability to write here on BG Views.

The MT.org site has a lot of great info online. For general things I am going to refer you to read them. For specifics to our site, those will be posted here (at a later date).

Please see the main documentation and wiki pages. From there you can drill down to find what you need. Additionally, you may wish to check out the Six Apart Guide to Business Blogging, and most importantly, the Authoring Guide.

You can always contact me here: webmaster [at] bgviews [dot] com.