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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Dec
2
(2006)
I’ve been meaning to get off my butt and finish mocking up an Eduglu prototype. I’ve been dabbling with a Drupal site, powered by Organic Groups and Aggregator2. I had it basically working on my desktop box, and just tried reproducing the basic pattern here on my Dreamhost server. The whole thing took maybe 15 minutes to set up. Except that it doesn’t work. Dreamhost has disabled the curl in PHP, so the Aggregator2 feed update functions just fail silently. curl, foiled again! (it borked the del.icio.us plugin as well). Instead of spending my time fighting with Dreamhost and porting modules to not use curl, I’ll just finish mocking things up on my desktop or another server.
The recent talk about Northern Voice 2007 was probably the kick in the pants I needed to get back on the case. It was the day before Moose Camp 2006 (this February, which is in turn the day before Northern Voice) where the ideas for Eduglu really gelled for me, and I vowed to try to do something to bring it to fruition. Then promptly returned to being swamped and burned out, so nothing concrete came of it. Doh. OK, to be fair, “vowed” is probably too strong. I didn’t swear an oath, or write a manifesto or anything, but it was something that I said I thought was important, and I didn’t follow through.
I’ll be working on it more over the next few weeks. Once I’ve figured out a stable-ish location (even if it winds up being (temporarily) on my desktop in the office), I’ll share the link. It’s not going to be earth shattering. Really, it’s just SuprGLU with a couple of concepts added (Ozmozr has added the concept of Groups, but what is really needed instead is the concept of Class, Cohort, Semester, etc…)
Bill, thanks for the tips! I’ve been playing with aggregator2, but it’s not working nearly as well as it did several months ago (i.e., it’s not sucking items in at all now). I’ll check out leech and feedparser ASAP. Thanks!
maybe I’ve just been overthinking this (too, again, etc…).
Maybe we don’t need a central aggregator that is aware of the concepts of Class, Cohort, Group, etc… Maybe it’s more along the lines of showing people how to assemble feeds however they want. Maybe what’s really needed is a way for people to list the various feeds that represent their online activities, and let people do what they want with them.
Ideally, it’d let you enter a list of all feeds (my blog, my Flickr, my del.icio.us, my other blog, my Facebook, my MySpace, etc…), perhaps listing multiple feeds per source (a feed of items tagged with “BIO686″ from my blog, etc… so people could subscribe to stuff relating to a particular course…
Hmm….
Hello, D’Arcy,
For a Drupal-based solution, you also might want to check out the leech module or the feedparser module — they are both improvements on agg2 —
http://drupal.org/project/feedparser
http://drupal.org/project/leech
Cheers,
Bill
About time you got off yer lazy butt…
Great to hear about avtivity, and if we can help here, let us know. We’ve been flogging away at aggrssive 2, but ran into performance issues with 20+ sites…
Have you been following Tony Hirst’s blog? He’s been pulling out a couple angles that might be useful: one is delivering content in chunks via RSS:
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/008866.html
And this tool Grazr (and Stringle):
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/008208.html
Maybe just muddies the water, but this strikes me as creative stuff.
I just mocked up basic functionality using Leech.module. Wow. That’s close. It tries to tie into Organic Groups, so you can associate a feed (and its items-as-nodes) with any Organic Group(s) you belong to. That would be PERFECT, if it worked. I’ll try to put some time into making Leech work a bit better, and Eduglu is basically done. Cool.