April 24, 2008
Embedding Single OpenLearn Unit Pages in an Arbitrary Blog Post
I'm really pushed for time at the moment, so it's looking like the Visual Gadgets uncourse blog is going to have to be produced with as little effort, and as in little time, as possible...! ;-)
The approach I want to explore is combing posts built almost entirely around content forma single page of an OpenLearn unit, with posts of my own built around dynamically included data and on the fly chart generation using the Google visualisation API.
So for example, today's post (Presenting Data in Tables), which is the first 'proper' contentful post, took maybe 10 minutes, plus 10 minutes tool building....
This post is built around a Grazr widget that contains the content from a single page page on a particular OpenLearn unit. (Each unit page on the OpenLearn site is represented by a single feed item within the full content RSS feed for the corresponding unit.)
(You many notice that the Grazr widget is displaying the content of the first item fed into the widget in an uncollapsed/expanded way... (or you may not!;-) This is achieved by passing the argument &exp=1 into the widget, which tells it to expand the identified feed item. More here: Grazr widget arguments.)
Earlier in the week, I had been exploring how I could use a transclusion hack (based on Purple Include) to mine the item from an OpenLearn unit XML feed, but this approach is far less techie;-)
Here's the tool I built, anyway:
You can find the pipe here: "OpenLearn unit feed item title filter" pipe
It works by taking in an OpenLearn Unit code, and fetching the content RSS feed for that unit. A filter then acts on the feed, only allowing items through whose description contains a query term, which corresponds to the title (or part of the title) of the single OpenLearn page you want to appear in the feed.
I also created a simple form to allow for the easy creation of the Grazr widget URLs based on an OpenLearn Unit code and a title filter term: OpenLearn Unit filtered item(s) widget form.
I did ponder the idea of setting up a pipeline that would take the filtered feed and generate a PDF document that could then be displayed in iPaper, but that was getting to be a few too many steps in the pipleline, and I'm not sure what the benefit would have been (though it did get me wondering whether Scribd have any intention of supporting an "RSS feed import" as one of their upload document types!)
Anyway, here's hoping there are enough appropriate single OpenLearn pages on graphs, charts and data representation and visualisation to allow nme to crack on with Visual Gadgets in such a painless way!;-)
PS Of course, I'm also hoping that with Grazr reinventing itself as a feedmerging business (What Does Grazr Do?), the widget will continue to be made available...
Tags: visualgadgets, grazr, openlearn
Posted by ajh59 at April 24, 2008 06:31 PM