January 13, 2007
ouseful.open.ac.uk Pageflaked Homepage
For a long time, the ouseful.open.ac.uk index page has pointed to a web service that searches a database of OU course titles and the titles of books associated with a course in order to make course recommendations. I've been meaning to redesign the page to be more generally OUseful for some time, something that will actually happen over the coming weeks, I hope, but in the meantime I've set the page to redirect to a shared/public Pageflakes page:
I'm still working out what's the best content to put on the page - and may well need to write a few custom flakes to get the functionality I want - but my first attempt (shown above) contains a lot of what I wanted on the front page, if not in quite the style I had in mind.
At the moment, there are links to the major OUseful sites (this blog, the calendar, OpenLearn_daily and so on, some feeds (from the Feedburner feed of the blog, the calendar and my del.icio.us feedthru tag (so there will be some duplication of content with the blog feed, at times)), a notepad ('about' the contents of the page) and a message board (though I'm a bit twitchy about that...)
The page took maybe 20 minutes to pull together and represents a reasonable pattern, I think, for this sort of information page. Being shareable, I assume that - if you're a Pageflakes user - you'll be able to add it to your own Pageflakes profile.
If you'd like to take a look, here's a link: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk.
One thing that did strike me is that I can't get access to any stats from Pageflakes about how the page is being used. However, I did wonder if it would be possible to use Google Analytics to collect shared Pageflakes tab data. I'll let you know how I get on with this...
PS May 2007 - the OUseful homepage now has two further tabs: one that relays links from OU news and jobs RSS feeds, one that relays saved search feeds about the OU from various news and social media websites.
Posted by ajh59 at January 13, 2007 02:35 PM