September 05, 2007
feedshow - A Feed Powered Web Page Presentation Tool
Quite some time ago, I posted about deliShow: A del.icio.us RSS Slide Show which allowed you to "to run a slideshow or presentation of web pages, fed from a delicious RSS feed".
As anyone who has attended a OUseful.info session in the last year or so will tell you, one of the approaches I often take is to go for a misguided tour through a bewildering array of online locations. That said, I quite often have a set of core locations I intend to visit, usually in a particular order, throughout the session, and I tend to collect these beforehand either on delicious or on an H20 Playlist. That is, I collect the links somewhere I can feed from... :-)
So as preparation for some forthcoming talks, I thought I'd revamp deliShow, and here's the first revision result: feedshow
feedshow is passed the URL of an RSS feed via the url argument of the feedshow URL:
http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/feedshow/feedshow.php?url=http://del.icio.us/rss/psychemedia/fun
A trivial (i.e. empty ;-) Yahoo pipe then parses the feed and passes its contents back to the page via a JSON feed.
To view the first page listed in the feed, click on the Current button. Clicking on Back and Forward take you to the previous and next items respectively. Note that going forward from the end of the feed takes you back to the start, and vice versa.
If you want to go walkabout by following links form a particular page, feel free to do so - hitting the Current button will take you back to the fed page from which you started to ramble.
Similarly, you can also go walkabout via specific, 'user contributed' URL - simply enter it into the text box and hit Go. As before, clicking the Current button will bring you back onto the feed path.
feedshow isn't quite as slick as fichey but I think it will meet my needs...
There are a quite a few opportunities for tightening up and polishing the app (such as a notification that a feed is being loaded, show launching bookmarklets, autodiscovery of feeds from HTML pages etc.) but they are left for a day night (?!) when I have a bit more time...
Super. I'll use it for a presentation tomorrow ;-) It seems to have a problem with some (media)wikipages though. (This one for instance: http://japanologie.arts.kuleuven.be/geschiedenis/index.php/Ashikaga_Yoshimitsu)
Any idea why?
Do you have an example feed that breaks with the above (I'd test it now but I have to sign off in a couple of mins for a day or two...)
I have noticed previously in other experiments (Wikimail in particular) that MediaWiki likes to sit at the top of a browser window - that is, it doesn't seem to like being in a frame).
I've never really explored this though... is that the problem you were having? The mediawiki hijacking the whole browser window?
The previous version of this app - deliShow - used a separate window for the controller. Maybe I should do another version that uses a 'remote control' window?
(No time to do that now until next week at the earliest... got a festival - the Bestival - to go to...;-)
tony
Posted by: Tony Hirst at September 6, 2007 09:31 PMPS let me know how your presentation goes, and whether you have any other problems/ideas for how the app might be improved for 'live' use.
I was considering a drop down that listed each of the in the feed, a bit like a firefox live bookmark, and that could be used to navigate to an arbitrary page from the feed.
The only problem then is - should 'current' become the page that is loaded from the list, or should it stay as the one that was in focus before the list was used to divert attention?!
Posted by: Tony Hirst at September 6, 2007 09:35 PM