Blog Posts

Old posts migrated

I just migrated a bunch of relevant posts from my personal weblog into this one. This is where they should have been put in the first place, except for the fact that this blog didn’t exist before February 2003…

RSS Search queries in CAREO

Well, that was kind of cool… I just implemented xml feeds for search queries in CAREO. Took about half an hour.

You can subscribe to any term you would normally enter in the search field in CAREO. Not sure how/if it would handle multiple words or anything. I guess as long as they’re URL encoded it should work.

Anyway, here’s how to subscribe:

http://careo.ucalgary.ca/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Repository.woa/wa/Search?theme=rss&query=MYSEARCHQUERY

Just replace “MYSEARCHQUERY” with whatever you want to look for. The top 10 results, sorted by relevancy, are returned. Searching for some stuff will be slow (something like “image” will get a bajillion results, which must be sorted for the top 10…)

The Reusability Paradox

Just came across this link from Brian Lamb’s weblog…

Very interesting article, which basically boils down to something like “Technical interoperability is not the same as semantic interoperability” and goes on to discuss some interesting issues involving the granularity of a learning object, and the impact that has on its value and reusability.

That was fast...

Just realized the RSS theme went from “Hey, that would be cool” to working prototype in under an hour and a half… And that was doing the vast majority of the theme fragment creation/conversion/entry manually to get around the namespace issue… Could have been about 15 minutes otherwise. Theming is cool ;-)

CAREO RSS Prototype goes live

I just hacked together a quick and dirty RSS theme in CAREO. Doesn’t do a heck of a lot yet, but it’s been a real eye-opener on what else will be required in the theming engine.

Test feed is located here. It might be down, or broken, or whatever. It’s waaay pre-alpha, prototype code. I’m subscribed to it in NetNewsWire, and will track it over the next few days to see how it works.

RSS as a theme in CAREO?

I’ve been toying with the idea of implementing an RSS theme for CAREO, mostly as a way to prove that theming really does work, and that the interface really CAN be anything (including a machine-readable XML feed).

Stephen Downes was talking about RSS and Learning Objects at the IMS Technical Meetings (from what I hear), and Brian Lamb is talking about it too.

Might have to whip up an RSS theme that will expose an XML feed for stuff like Top Objects, Newest Objects, or perhaps a search query? They’d have to be run as the Guest user, since I’m not about to do authentication from URL parameters (something about security or some such thing…)

Repository theming goes live

I published the latest UCRepositoryCore framework, and the latest version of CAREO, to careo.ucalgary.ca today.

Minor “issues” - mostly cosmetic, which will be resolved when all components have been converted to the new xml format.

SciQ Pre-Alpha Goes Live

I’ve updated the theme for the SciQ Pre-Alpha theme. This version should handle stretching (vertically) much better. Granted, the search results pages won’t be too long anyway, but I have to accommodate any length of page since they’re being generated dynamically.

Currently, I’ve used placeholder “content” for all pages. I know, the default “Home” page won’t be Q-Live, but I had graphics for that. And yes, I know the Q-Live button doesn’t go anywhere (but you JUST SAID Q-Live had graphics! I know… I have to write a WebObjects component in the UCRepositoryCore framework that can handle “changeable” pages like in the Learning Commons Website. Should be done Monday or Tuesday of next week.)

IMS Technical Meeting notes

Stephen Downes has posted his notes from the IMS Technical meeting.

The page has a rather disturbing title, but it looks like a quick overview of the session for anyone who missed it (like myself).

SciQ Interface progress

Reworked the sliced-and-diced HTML for the SciQ theme in CAREO. Works much nicer now, and scales vertically when needed (without having the table layout puke all over the place).

Now that the basic HTML is in place, I need to write a generic WOComponent that can handle parameters from the URL to read Article text from the database (like the LC website does).

VERY rough version of this is available here (don’t send the link around - it’s likely going to be down quite a bit, and changing every now and then - I’ll send the public URL when it’s ready).

SciQ Interface

Spent the day converting the static photoshop files from IdeaMachine into actual working HTML and JPEG files. ImageReady is worth its weight in gold for this… Set up some guides, slices etc., clean them up, and cest fini.

I’m working with the ImageReady-generated html, massaging it for use as a theme in CAREO (specifically for PageTemplate, but there are quite a few lesser components which will be used - Sidebar, BreadCrumbsCAREO, SearchBar…)

WOHyperlinks etc... in Theme fragments

I’ve decided to alter the .xsl file that generates the .wod string to assume any WOHyperlink, WOForm, WOImageButton etc… will be able to accept a ?theme=x parameter.

It seems to work well, but it also means that links to external pages will have a url parameter tacked on that could either be ignored (hopefully), or possibly misinterpreted.

I don’t expect I’ll be linking to external CGI scripts, and other pages aren’t likely to read parameters from the URL, so it’s a risk I’ll be willing to take.