New RSS Feed: Teaching and Learning on the Web
Alan Levine aka CogDog barked this July 16th, 2003 9:15 am
Building on the code done for adding RSS to our DirectorWeb site, it took less than an hour to integrate it into our Teaching & Learning on the Web.
Once again, adding RSS was wonderfully simple.
You can find this new feed at
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tl/new.rss
This was one of the first web resource collections we built, maybe back in 1995 or 1996, collecting examples of how teachers were using the web (when the web was rather exotic), and organizing it into a colleciton searchable/browsable by keyword or discipline. At first all submissions went directly into the collection, until we saw the garbage some folks sent in (weekly we get stuff from Russian mail bride sites), and built a web admin front end for us to review content.
This is despite a rather long pre-amble before the form that describes what we allow into the site.
Since this is a resource site with public submissions, it was not much work to collect the information (title, url, description) submitted to a temp file which I then could process into RSS once the site was verified in our home grown admin tool.
We are in the process of converting this site from its flat file text format (indexed by the glimpse app) to a mySQL database format, and then we can get rid of the frames.
But adding an RSS feed was pretty trivial. Very trivial. Extremely trivial. Utterly trivial.
Heck, if I can do this, a big learning object repository site should be able to publish RSS easily.
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July 16th, 2003 at 9:25 am
nice subtle suggestion for the vinyard…
July 16th, 2003 at 1:36 pm
I have the Merlot source code on my desktop. Mwa-ha-ha…
Actually, I might not use it, since *I think* we got it to solve the wrong kind of problem. I’d actually appreciate your input.
Our system office wants to coordinate the electronic content that people are creating around our system. They have CDs, materials sent via e-mail and stuff on websites around the system. There is a grand plan (and funding) for an IBM contentserver two years from now, but until then they need something that works, so they figured the Merlot code, since we’re a partner.
However, I’m more inclined to say a weblog with categories. I may be inclined to see nails because of this hammer in my hand, but wouldn’t MT work here? or CAREO?
This is what they have right now - manually updated - http://www.vccs.edu/vccsit/ITDE_LOCUS.htm
Any ideas?
David
July 16th, 2003 at 1:38 pm
p.s. they’re not really interested in reviews, etc. They just want to get organized. It may be that user submission would be important, but not necessarily, as long as administrators weren’t overburdened.