how to : tag-specific site feeds

For one of my classes (Future Craft), part of the course is maintaining a blog to post our work and discussions from the course. We have the option to either start a completely new blog or to just create a tag in an existing one.

I had to ask myself: do I want to start another blog that I would use for only one semester and then drop afterwards - thus adding another site to the abandoned internet wasteland? Or, do I want to open up my work and increase traffic to this blog by adding a tag, but then have all my classmates getting mixed up in posts that are clearly unrelated to the course? (The issue of privacy really is moot, since pretty much anything I write online is meant to be read - privacy doesn't quite exist in cyberspace.)

These wonderings lead to my investigation into how one would actually even create a RSS feed for a single blog tag. And yes, it can be done! Blogger's help section isn't terribly conducive to finding this information (and one of their other help articles didn't work), but I did find it here. Essentially what you need to do is insert the following address into the feed reader:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname

Of course, you need to replace "blogname" with your...blog name, and the "labelname" in the same way. This works beautifully.

With that said...I started another blog. By now, this is the 3rd blog I've started for a specific project (the other two being for the brick masonry vault project - which still lives on - and the SAP Builds blog, which was specific to my January El Salvador trip but might be revived if the group keeps going). Why start another one?

1. I like blogging.
2. It's an experiment: this time around, I'll be starting one on Tumblr, a relatively new blog site launched about 3 years ago. I have blogs on Blogger and Wordpress, but now it's time to see how Tumblr works and if it holds up to the traffic.
3. I'm curious : not only does Tumblr seem to have some cool design templates beyond what's readily available on Wordpress and Blogger (outside of designing my own site completely), but the focus is on microblogging, tumbleblogging, or just short, to the point posts that are sort of something between Twitter and typical blog sites. Sure, the posts will probably still be something at length, but see #2.
4. It's also another experiment in targeted blogging. I discovered through the SAP Builds and Vault blogs that really focused sites are easier to describe to others and sometimes attract more of a "following" than general personal blogs. Of course, this blog here resists the specificity since I'm sort of a generalist, but...yeah go to back to #2. I might just end up mashing them all up together in the end - who knows?

Anyways, it's still in its birthing stages but check it out for updates later (will dual-post as well to give a taste):

crafting the future