It’s one thing to mutter promises of being back, it’s quite another to actually do it.
Through an unlikely path (again), I have finally managed to resurrect the wall of media web presentation tool I ran with for a long while, that which was once known as CoolIris. This was something I fleshed out first in February 2009 used for a presentation on then Gee Whiz Technology at my old Maricopa stomping grounds, done at Scottsdale Community College.
Indeed it was a flash powered gizmo that generated this media display of images that could be linked to play video, audio, or jump to external sites. It was generated by a funky form of RSS called MediaRSS. But what it allowed for a presentation was this wall of media- I could navigate linearly from one “slide” to the next with arrow keys, but I could also jump around in order.
But the pinnacle, for me, was how perfect it worked in August 2009 as the means to present Amazing Stories of Openness at OpenEd in Vancouver. in which I shared a bunch of video clips of people telling stories about the magic, unexpected wonders that happened because they shared something online.
Of course it died when CoolIris was gobbled by Yahoo and then Flash imploded. And the way to experience it was lost. At some point I was able to screen capture a video of how it worked–
— but at some point it was not able to embed on the web page. I chalked it up to another web bites the dust.
But now… it’ back, and you can see it in action right there in the Amazing Stories of Openness page. Go on, click and scroll down to the mention of CoolIris.
How this happened was…one of those unlikely stories. Blame or credit this on today’s ds106 daily create in which Kevin Hodgen promoted writing na observational haiku based on observing nature. Good guy that he is, Kevin used and attributed one of my flickr photos titled “Nature in Salem, Massachusetts”.
I was a bit fuzzy on when/why I was in Salem. The photo date was 16 years ago, somewhat worth remarking
I was able to navigate to the photos around, and remembered I did a keynote talk in 2009 at Salem State College. It was when I got to the web page I realized it was one of the ones I had done with CoolIris that was now defunct.
Then I remembered somewhere I had heard from Tim Owens that he had something resurrected running CoolIris. I could not find it on his site, but asked in Mastodon, and he remembered that he had a prototype working with the Flash Emulator Ruffle. Sure enough, he sent the demo (it was for one of my 50 Web Ways to Tell a Story talks), and sure enough, I saw the CoolIris in action where Time had posted it as https://cooliris.timowens.io/
I remember trying to replicate what Tim did but coming up short. I was looking over Tim’s source code, and then the media.rss file that was working on his server https://cooliris.timowens.io/media.rss – it struck me that a key difference was the use if full URLs for the images and media, not relative path ones.
It was a bit more tinkering on my side to realize that all the links sent to the flash player, the link to the .swf itself, even the path to the media.rss file, needed to be full URLs.
What I might have though would work:
<object id="o" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="600" height="450">
<param name="movie" value="cooliris.swf">
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="never">
<param name="flashvars" value="feed=show.rss">
<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="cooliris.swf" flashvars="feed=show.rss" width="600" height="450" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="never">
</object>was not working, but by making them all full URLs (as well as my show.rss file)
<object id="o" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="600" height="450">
<param name="movie" value="https://bones.cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/cooliris.swf">
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="never">
<param name="flashvars" value="feed=https://bones.cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/show.rss">
<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="https://bones.cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/cooliris.swf" flashvars="feed=https://bones.cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/show.rss" width="600" height="450" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="never">
</object>did work!
I went back to the Amazing Stories one, and got it working too, it even plays the videos via full URLs to the .flv files.
It’s just retro geekery, but I am really energized that I could get a 16 year old technology, abandoned by its creators, a platform (Flash) that was deep-sixed by Steve Jobs, and the sucker now works. How more reclaimy can I be?
I have quite a few more to tinker with, and even with it working, there’s tons of old links to fix (because some people- COUGH the EDUCAUSE folks who hoovered all the NMC.org web sites I built but left them offline– do not take care of their URLs…).
Now I might even be tempted to put CoolIris to work for some conference about rewilding reclaimed open stuff.
Cool! CoolIris is back.
Featured Image: Presentation Wall of CoolIris flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain superimposed with a meme-aresenal generated image of the Terminator and text “I AM BACK”
