KNotations

I've been writing in my elarning2.0 blog about some tips and ideas for creating mashed-up 'inside and outside' content:

The editors of the NGRF site have been 'getting' the power of social-bookmarking lately, and have started to assemble a useful resource at their del.icio.us account. While drafting an email to them about options for leveraging that resource within the NGRF site, it occurred to me that a very easy technique already exists for bringing 'live' links lists into discursive site content, using the javascript linkroll feature from del.icio.us itself. This post explains how to do that.

see also this comment on that post: -- Oh and by the way, regular followers of knotes development should notice that some progress has been made towards usability of the discussion system... much more to come, but I think you'll agree that the new way of displaying comments and trackbacks is at least nice-looking and straightforward.

I've been meaning to post another big blog entry about this but have no time. I've had some thoughts towards designing very simple Plone add-ons that would make this even easier for end-users, give them access to their content/tag streams from flickr, furl and other social-software services, and cache the RSS within their local portal, sparing del.icio.us bandwidth. It would also overcome the glitchiness of having javascript-based writing into the document, with round-trips from another, site during pageload. We do not have time to write these now, but I'll try to elaborate on the design as soon a I can.

Have a look at this new testbed in the NGRF site. It's where ourselves and the editorial team from the NGRF are going to be hammering hard at the discussion system issues over the next few days.

Welcome beta testers to a set of new weblogs for the NGRF. During late November 2005 we're using these weblogs to work out a new interface for discussion, and new looks for the weblogs. Please bear with us if you encounter problems using them.

Already there are some important improvements:

member profiles

most of the features needed for basic profiles are working. Names of authors/commenters are links to their profiles in weblog views. This demo includes the display of some more advanced features using static data for display. If you fancy having a go yourself, the template names work in all the sites including the knownet site: $portal_url/Members/my-username/profile to view, $portal_url/profile_edit_form to edit your own (yes, the edit-form needs a bit of guide text and formtting - we'll be adding / changing fields so hav not settled that form yet).

reply from within blog one-entry view

there is a simple comment form directly within the one-entry blog view, with AJAXian log-in formlet for convenience.

better context in the main RSS 2 feed

discussion items in the RSS 2 feed now have a tagline pointing to the item they reply to. The node in the RSS 2 feefd now points to a usable interface (for blog entries only as of today, discussion items to follow shortly)

pretty-printing of level- comments on blog entries

this has been the case in my own elearning2.0 blog for a couple weeks... much nicer display of comments and trackbacks on blog entries in blog one-entry view

access to experimental 'blog-forum' ajaxian discussion forum view

the main banvigation links now include 'forum' which points to a new forum-view for the weblog. I'll post a lot more detail about it when it's a bit more mature, but do try clicking on the icons at the far left of rows to fetch the row's subcontents/replies, an do explore the ajaxian batching and blog-like navigation ... actually, ince there is so little demo content in those weblogs, try this link instead for blog-forums - experimental - for KNotations weblog.

Over the course of today we'll be concentrating on the blog-forum views so that we have a good permalink for discussion items, and also try to 'enliven' some of the member profile features which sre represented by static data in the NGRF demos.

This is just a test of del.icio.us playtagger - the new shared javascript from del.icio.us which enhances mp3 links with a lightweight flash object to play the audio, streamed, in the browser, in your page. The enhancement also places a tag-me link to post the mp3 to delicious.

This could be a great way for ordinary endusers to get the best of both podcasting and in-page playing: posting mp3 files is the open, standards-based way to share audio, allowing real RSS podcasting, permalink-sharing, user-timed listening etc. But some authors like the in-page feature that an embedded flash object provides, and seem unaware of the advantages of simply posting mp3's from the user's point of view. For an example of audio which will play in the page via Flash, but otherwise cannot be used, see this page of 'podcasted' interviews

If this little delicious shared javascript trickery works, it should mean that just attaching an audio file to a knotes blog post makes it playable in the page and usable as a file if the user wants to save it, link to it, or subscribe to podcasts.

I'm attaching a little audio file: please forgive the copyright-busting; if you enjoy it, do by all means look Catfish Keith up and buy some CDs :o)

If this works, you should be able to do streamed listening to the audio attachment (see above for the link - it should have a little arrow nexk to it, like a forward button). I may have to change some templates to get the script include into the head; for this example I'm first trying the script include in the body of this message. I looked over the 3289 bytes of the include and it does not look to me as if it needs to be in the page header.

We've been aware for a long time that the javascript / DOM editing 'window' caused big usability problems for KNotes. Replacing it has taken some effort, but we're almost there with much improved solutions. I have to spend a lot of today on (sigh, yet again) admin, but I truly expect to be demoing alternatives in the NGRF testbed by mid-afternoon friday at the latest.

Some of the solutions are straight, accessible html - but they should load somewhat faster than most plone edit forms because they can avoid the rendering and markup load of the navigational context ( we can simplify the edit pages to remove much of that context ). Where possible, we're including simplest-case reply forms in the pages a user would be replying to, saving the roundtrip otherwise required to load the form. Some other solutions will be 'ajaxian', but will be much lighter-weight and more usable than the existing 'pswin' - and none will expect the user to drag dom elements around the page :o)

The replacement solution will be introduced in batches of cases, starting with reply, add-blog-entry and edit entry.

Back with a more complete update this time tomorrow.

By the way, this also mean that we are finally inches away from removing the fast-folders product dependency! hooray!