November 14, 2006
Online OPML Feed Management
A couple of people have asked over the last week or two whether I knew of an online OPML manager that could be used to create and organise hosted OPML feeds that could then be wired directly into StringLE.
I had a bit of a play over the weekend, and again today over lunch, and from the list of OPML managers I've collected, OPML Manager seems to fit the bill nicely.
So nicely, in fact, I'm using it to feed the default Stringle environment:
What this means is I now have a completely online solution for handling what gets fed into the Stringle navigation panel (remember, you can enter your own URL for the OPML feed using the customisation panel or the StringLE URL API).
I've added a link to OPML Manager from the top bar of StringLE. These tool links open in the Tools tab/panel (links from the Grazr navigation widget on the left hand side open in the Web panel).
You'll notice that the Grazr widget is now displaying a couple of OPML files (the blue feed icon). These are fed into Grazr as links - Grazr sniffs out the opml suffix and then handles them as you might expect it to...
I'm actually use these OPML files to pull in GrazrScripted search boxes - one for the OU Voyager library catalogue, one for Amazon (read more about Amazon in Grazr).
The Learning Materials section pulls in OpenLearn/Labspace content that I transformed to RSS, both directly and in a crude 'remix' - feeds generated from two Openlearn courses and piped through FeedDigest, along with a podcast feed, filtered using a couple of keywords, and then displayed in another Grazr widget (I'll pop a diagram up to show how it works in a couple of days...;-)
One thing I noticed doing this is that Grazr is capable of playing audio files embedded in a feed - there are some examples in the Learning materials section under 'Search Related IT Conversations' and here:
Apparently, embedded movies are also on the way...
If you try out StringLE, why not pop in to the chat room to see if anyone else is there. There is also a wiki that I'm going to start adding content to, too, but feel free to chip in (anonymous access is allowed but you need the password: StringLE).
If anyone wants an invite to the demo whiteboard or Elgg space, mail me... or leave a note in the wiki (create an Invites... page if there isn't one there already...)
Posted by ajh59 at November 14, 2006 06:29 PM