March 31, 2007
Towards an OpenLearn XML (Re)Publishing System
This post is place for me to pop down a link or two to some bits and pieces I've been tinkering with over the last couple of days relating to various transfomations of OpenLearn XML. If I get a chance over the Easter break, I intend to reconcile the various tools and approaches and pop them into a small republishing environment...so it's important, I think, to record (albeit briefly) some of the components that will hopefully make such a thing easy to do...
OU OpenLearn XML to RSS
An OU xml2rss pipe: a Yahoo Pipe that lets you enter the URL to an OpenLearn XML file and it will then call the W3C XSLT engine (please don't hammer it) with an XSL file that maps OpenLearn XML onto RSS. OpenLearn RSS is the result.
(You may be able to work out some URLs to OpenLearn XML files by exploring the pipe and looking here!)
Demo: T180_8 XML2RSS. Here's the URL: http://preview.tinyurl.com/2xeoj9.
OpenLearn RSS2PDF
(After a demo by Stuart Brown, where he used xfruits to produce a PDF version of a course from an RSS feed, which he then uploaded to Scribd).
OpenLearn RSS2PDF: rss2pdf conversion of OpenLearn_RSS.
Combining the original translation and and PDF conversion, here's a Javascript function that takes an OpenLearn XML URL and pipelines the above mentioned services to produce a PDF version of the materials:
function getPDFURL(xmlURL){
rssURL="http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?xmlurl="+encodeURIComponent(xmlURL)+"&_id=0F8Z_y7d2xGkWV9fnkartA&_run=1&_render=rss";
return "http://www.rss2pdf.org/rss2pdf/?feed="+encodeURIComponent(rssURL);
}
Here's a bookmarklet that will generate a PDF from an OpenLearn_XML page.
OpenLearn_XML RSS Asset Stripper
After a brief chat with Laura Dewis from the OpenLearn team yesterday, I came away with the impression that a small script to pull out media assets from an OpenLearn_XML file might be useful.
It only took an hour or so to pull together, even with my limited XSL skills, and here was the result: OpenLearn_XML asset stripper (here's the OpenLearn XML asset stripper XSL).
I tidied it up a little more today to produce this OpenLearn_XML media asset viewer:
OpenLearn_XML Audio Asset Stripper
Marc Eisenstadt pushed for an easy way to grab audio assets. Here's how I took the request:
Here's the audio stripper XSL and here's the transformer URL.
This XSL actually produces an RSS feed with an enclosure element that links to each audio asset.
Summary
It's easy enough to mine the OpenLearn XML for media assets and then re-present them (thanks to Brian Suda from way back when for showing me how to use XSL to pull all the nodes of a particular type out of an XML file).
The next step for me is to pull all the above into a single page, where you can supply the URL to an OpenLearn_XML file and generate links to RSS, pdf and asset stripped versions of the content with a single click :-)
PS here's a start: OpenLearn_xmlProcessor
Posted by ajh59 at March 31, 2007 08:40 PM