March 02, 2007
Stringle Gets a Brush of Paint...
I've started doodling with Stringle so as this blog is the closest thing I have to a lab book, thought I'd better make a catch up post.
Stringle has had a lick of paint, as I start to move the styling over to YUI CSS components:
I've started trying to collect tools together that work within the Stringle iframe (though there are a couple of rogues in the list I need to pull out). You can see the list of tools I've collected so far on the StringLE Tool Selector page. I'm still working on the categories, as well as annotating the tools I've got (and continually collecting more). If you have suggestions for other tools, drop me a line.
There is also a list of Stringle profiles/configurations on the StringLE Profile Selector page. The profiles on this page are in various states of completion/disrepair (in fact, it's probably fair to say that they are all placeholder prfoiles at the moment to a greater or lesser extent), but they'll all be tuned over the next 3-4 weeks.
Stringle profiles, tool configurations and OPML navigation feeds are all bookmarkable via delicious, and reusable within delicious if you use the correct tagging convention: stringle:tool for a tool, stringle:profile for a profile. In addition, a stringle:ToolName tag alongside a stringle:tool tag will cause Stingle to display the tool in the top, tools menu bar with the title ToolName.
The tools page both pull in lists of links from delicious and then use dynamic Javascript/CSS to toggle the various views, so I guess they're AJAX pages? ;-) As ever, I'm only trying the tools out in Firefox 2.0, so bad things may happen in other browsers (drop me a line and bug report if so, along with a screenshot and ideally a fix, and I'll see if I can come up with a patch).
Usability on the tool and profile selectors is still off mark, as it is within Stringle too, but I've started thinking about that... (It surprised me how much more reliable the environment felt when I added the simple styling, even though none of the functionality changed!)
One thing I'm looking at doing is adopting a convention for the similar tagging of profiles, tools and naming of OPML Manager navigation feeds. This will enable me to shortcut the set up of a Stringle profile.
I'm also looking at reusable structures for the OPML navigation feed. An emerging model/demo can be seen in the stringleClimateChangeDemo (this works in FF on a Mac - not sure about elsewhere. Mail me if it feels/looks broken to you... ;-)
One thing I hope to explore is a 'keyword/search term semantic auto-configuration' route that will generate a canned OPML file according to a common structure when supplied with key terms to act as a starting point for further customisation of that profile on a particular topic. Think of this as a bit like an automatically generated starting point for topic based portal.
In a recent post on Pipes and HyperCard: Interactive vs Connected Media, Scott Wilson commented:
...the nature of content itself is changing. HyperCard, Flash, and the like are indeed tools of interactive media. However, interactive multimedia is no longer in fashion (who needs a "next page" button in a piece of content when we have ubiquitous hypertext? Why embed the movie in Flash when I can just link to YouTube?)Instead we have entered an era of connected media. Connected media does not contain interaction; instead content items are nodes in a network of connections that are the focus of interaction. The content is inside-out. The hot content today is not interactive - Flickr/Photobucket, YouTube, iTunes, RSS feeds all feature non-interactive content, yet the content is highly connected via layers of interlinked metadata (del.icio.us, technorati, recommendations, hyperlinks, comments...)
One thing I'm exploring with Stringle is how we can pull out appropriate, and small, related content networks and use them to support resource based learning around a topic at the centre of that network.
Once again, I think something like the circular diagram posted within John Breslin's Linking personal posted content across communities post could be useful to help me clarify this point/explore it further.
Posted by ajh59 at March 2, 2007 06:39 PM