It had to happen. Faced with a big list of important things to fix, I go and instead develop support for Twitter, and hooks for other micro-blogging services.
Category Archives: conduits
Another a-ha moment – FF as SWORD droplet
Well there’s a thing. I added file transfer support to the FF “services” view, and immediately (well, after a bit of hacking), you can now use FF as a droplet for sending files to SWORD services. In fact you can hide the rest of the UI and use just that view alone. Nice, eh?
SWORD
I was going to title this post with some sort of pithy remark like “live by the SWORD”, “Fallen on my own SWORD” etc., but thankfully resisted the urge.
I’ve got SWORD protocol basically worked out; this was planned for M2 next April, but as there was a JISC programme meeting I worked on it early. As it was a family-wide cold/’flu/lirgy meant I couldnt go anyway. Oh well.
Still, FeedForward does now have some basic SWORD functionality, and can deposit a context (user collection) into an academic repository such as IntraLibrary (Learning objects) or ePrints (papers). This does require a bit of faffing about figuring how to render the context in some meaningful way; for IntraLibrary I just build an IMS Content Package using the Context’s contents. But what would I do, realistically, with what is basically a list of references and notes for deposit in ePrints? A skeletal paper outline?
No FF blog post is allowed without a least one image, so here it is:
Service creation workflow
Navigating the maze of options you need to sort out for various services is quite a challenge. I’ve had to create a flowchart to keep track.
(Note SWORD is on here – I’ve got that basically working now, but its not for Release 1 as I really need to sort out dependencies as they overlap with those for other Atom code I use.)
Service wizard
The service wizard helps users configure a conduit, and uses autodiscovery to help figure out settings for not-so-obvious setups as Blogger (Google) and WordPress’s new Atompub support.
Note that blogs and social bookmarks are now supported; you can see ghosted out the things we’ll add for releases 2 and 3 next year.
Conduits wireframe
This is the original wireframe for the Conduits plugin:
Implementing conduits (services)
I’ve just implemented the Conduits plugin, which is what provides things like services for publishing items to blogs, social bookmarking services, repositories, citation services (etc). Its not much to look at, but it does basically follow the design wireframes. In the image below, the Radar plugin is the panel on the left; the Conduits are on the right:
The plugin drag-and-drop model uses standard URLs, so there is an interesting side-effect: you can just drag any URL from any application onto the services in FF, and it will publish them to the service. So, you can actually just use the Conduits plugin as a standalone publishing “droplet”, like so:
So far I’ve ported the del.icio.us and APP conduits from Plex, our earlier prototype system.