OUseful Info

Grazr 2.0 Beta - Drag'n'Drop Feed Management

[UPDATE: Grazr 2 is coming out of beta any time... the beta site is public - http://beta.grazr.com]

I got an invite onto the Grazr 2.0 beta today (thanks, Adam :-) and spent an hour or so this evening pottering around with it.

(For the wow bits - scroll down to the end of the the post and check out the 2.0 goodness editor :-)

The new front page is far more appealing than the current front page, with a two column layout that displays recent reading lists in the main panel, and admin info down the right hand side:

It'll be interesting to know what sort of algorithm is being used to display the 'recent' feeds.. is there a secret ingredient or two in there, such as reading list popularity, or authority of the reading list 'author' (or should that be compiler?) as well as recency?

You'll also notice the images associated with each reading list - these are openly licensed and taken from flickr (even so, is attribution required somewhere? [Apparently, "If you look at any Read page with an image, you'll notice a photo credit back to the author and a CC link to the license. "]), and can be associated with a reading list when you first create'n'save it.

Your own personal reading list has a similar look'n'feel, although there are a few user controls associated with each reading list: share, create a widget, edit and delete:

The share option takes you to a new page with an email share feature.

The share page is also linked to from the page you get to by clciking on the feed image or title - what I call the 'read' page for no good reason other than to follow the URL convention!

This provides a link to the OPML URL of the reading list as well as embed and pop-up code.

To get further customisation of the widget, you can always visit the Create a Widget page (which is the one that you can reach from the Grazr widget itself):

Anyway, anyway - now for the real 2.0 goodness: the reading list editor. This drag'n'drop environment lets you add feeds (or page links) if you know the URL, as well as text elements. GrazrScript editing is not available in the current beta...

The feed items can be rearranged by dragging and dropping. The ability to add folders means that it's trivial to organise your reading list. Changing the name of a preloaded feed is simple - just double click and edit away to your heart's content.

There's no preview feature on the editor page - you have to save and close back to the read view for that - but that's a small price to pay.

The drag'n'drop goodness only starts there, however - because links and highlighted text can be dragged from any other browser window and dropped into the editor pane.

The first way of doing this is from the Discover panel links: simply drag a link from a Grazr widget and drop it into your own reading list, where it'll be recognised for what it is (text link, RSS feed, OPML feed etc.).

If you have other browser windows open, highlighted text, links, links to RSS feeds and so on can all be dragged onto the editor panel. Links from the borwser address bar can also be dragged and dropped into the editor.

I would have like to see autodiscovery of feeds from pages whose URLs are dropped into the editor, but Adam explained to me patiently (yet again) how autodiscovery just confuses the majority of people who don't get the difference between feeds and web pages anyway (and don't we all know how true that is!).

Maybe the Grazr front page needs a "Grazring the Web in Plain English" video?

Anyway, anyway - if you're looking for an OPML manager, Grazr 2.0 should be out of beta soon, and it'll be well worth your while having a play with.

At the other end of the expertise scale, if you wonder what those square orange icons all over the web are, get yourself a Grazr 2.0 account, create a reading list and drop a few of them into the editor, then use a full page Grazr widget to display the result :-)

For example - here's OpenLearn in a Grazr widget

[The beta is closed but open... find out more here]

PS here's an interesting educational use of Grazr: Building a course reading list in Grazr

PPS here's a demo movie:

Posted by ajh59 at September 19, 2007 10:21 PM