December 13, 2007
RSS Feed Demo from Yale Open Courseware
Following the announcement earlier this week of the MIT open courseware material for High Schools, Yale have released a set of lectures on their open content site: Open Yale Courses.
Anyway, as you might expect, they don't offer RSS so I've started to look at what I might be able to pull out.
Here's a first approximation to a feed from Yale, via a Grazr widget: Open Yale: Fundamentals of Physics (here's the original course splash page):
I use a "Fetch Page" Yahoo pipe block to grab the list of individual lecture pages from here and then rewrite the URLs to point to the transcript of the lecture, adding a link to the MP3 audio file as an enclosure (so it'll play in the Grazr widget). I'll see if I can geta version working that plays the video in the widget too...
If you think it's clever and/or obviously very hard to do, it's not, it's about using your eyes to look at patterns across URLs, copying examples of other Yahoo pipes, and hacking the regular expressions around blindly till they appear to work.
I did try to get the pipe to force a page load of the relevant transcript into the corresponding description of each feed item, but for some reason it didn't work :-) Ho hum - will see if i can figure out why (maybe there are too many page load hits for the pipe to want to do it?!)
I used a similar page loading trick to get a feed of MIT Courseware for High Schools Course Topic Listings, a demo of how to get an MIT OCW for High Schools Courses by topic listing and an example itemised feed deconstruction of a particular course.
I think it'd be easy enough to hack a line or two of PHP to OPMLify a couple of the feeds and rewrite a URL or two so I could pipe the whole of the MIT open courseware for High Schools into a single Grazr widget, but to tell the truth I can't be bothered...
There's probably more than a few well funded and well resourced projects out there prattling around talking about how they might be able to do this sort of thing or that sort of thing or another sort of thing if only they could sort out what acronym to give the project, so I don't see why I should bother with yet another micro-effort demo of something fun to do, actually realised, but probably completely pointless.
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Tags: pointless, b****y, waste, of, time
Posted by ajh59 at December 13, 2007 08:47 PM