I have a few people ask about this recently, so I thought I’d blog about it, and maybe get an explanation out there.

When we started accepting bloggers on SQLServerCentral, it was a challenge to get people to move their blogs. We had some people that just started blogging with us, but others that were already blogging elsewhere. At first I wasn’t sure what to do, but when SQLServerPedia started syndicating bloggers, using feeds, I requested similar functionality for SQLServerCentral.

We built it, and while it’s a little crude, and we’ve modified things a few times, here’s how it works:

• You send us a note with
  • Your SQLServerCentral registered email
  • A feed URL
• You blog in English (sorry, English only)
• We read the feed and publish your blog on SQLServerCentral.

The Scary DBA has syndicated his blog, so you can see how the different things look on our site v the source. Some things don’t come across cleanly, and I’m working on getting some of those things fixed.

Frequency

We used to read feeds once a day, now we do it once an hour. So if you blog about something, it ought to be on the SQLServerCentral site in under 2 hours. If you think there is an issue, please contact the webmaster.

Hints

I use Live Writer to actually publish this blog on Blogspot. It lets me test things, but also gives me a backup of my blog and control over what I write. I think it’s a good idea to own your content, as well as keep a backup of it on your own blog.

Live Writer is a great piece of software for drafting blogs, scheduling them, working offline, etc. I actually sync my Live Writer folders  across my desktop and laptops. That gives me some additional capabilities to draft stuff on one machine and finish it on another.

I highly recommend people tag stuff they want to syndicate with a specific tag and then send us the feed of that tag. That allows you to still blog about something that you want to publish, but not syndicate it if you don’t want to. I know some people do this to publish other stuff in other languages, or they mix their personal/career blog and don’t necessarily want to send everything to SSC.

Setup

If you want to get setup, send a note to the webmaster at SQLServerCentral.com and we’ll get you syndicated.