Cetis Blogs - expert commentary on educational technology » feedforward

Ensemble: an OER aggregator

feedforward — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:36:23 +0000

I’ve been working with the Steeple podcasting folks to build an aggregator for searching feeds of Open Education Resources. The result – Ensemble – reuses various parts of Jopml plus some of the code found inside FeedForward for handling Opml processing and for feed autodiscovery.

You can try out Ensemble here.

So far I’ve just aggregated the feeds available from a few places, such as Oxford and the Open University, but it shows how the concept works. Next up I’m tweaking the indexing a bit, and putting in place some code to handle creative commons licenses more intelligently. The idea is that this would sit as a piece of middleware, and that widgets or other web apps can dynamically grab OPML or JSON for user queries.

Hey, that makes 3 spin-offs from one app, not bad going…

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FeedForward: A Personal Information Application

feedforward — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:29:36 +0000

I just submitted a paper that summarises the findings of the FeedForward project; it covers a lot of aspects of the project such as the design, the underlying approach to workflow, and the issues we had in implementation and also with interoperability. Worth a read if you’re interested in developing similar applications, or are thinking about the future of the information environment and the sort of standards we can use for scholarly communications.

Its CC-BY licensed so feel free to take sections and reuse them.

While this paper marks sort-of-the-end of the formal project, much more is happening in the world of FeedForward…

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New release (M2.2) – on the final stretch to 1.0

feedforward — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:18:28 +0000

We’re nearly there! The new release is now available to download. This is the last planned beta release before we make it to the 1.0.

We didn’t add many new features this time around, but we do have an About box. Not the most attractive ever, but at least you now know what version you’re trying out (thanks to Tore for pointing that out!).

Probably more significantly we’ve added a new Preferences dialog, with options to enter your web proxy settings (for those poor souls at Strathclyde Uni and elsewhere that need them – thanks John!) You can also tune how quickly FeedForward scans your feeds:

(Note that as we use a feedcache it won’t actually impact the sites too much if you crank it up.)

Hopefully if there are no new bugs, we can have the 1.0 launch in the next couple of months.

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FeedForward: 2nd place for “Most Innovative Project”

feedforward — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:08:01 +0000

I arrived at the JISC Repositories and Preservation programme meeting to find out that FeedForward had been voted 2nd in a competition for the title of “Most Innovative Project”. Nice!

Anyway, I had to improvise a “poster” and demo in the corridor by the coffee machine. Thankfully Dave Flanders was on hand with a room full of big pens and flipchart paper for me to borrow:

FeedForward posters

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FeedForward M2.1 released

feedforward — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:14:41 +0000

The releases are coming thick and fast as we get close to – finally – the 1.0 launch. We only plan one more beta build – M2.2, next month possibly – before we reach that target.

Milestone 2.1 adds the ability to locate and add feeds directly from Jopml (see the previous blog post), improved OPML import, and the ability to export collections in RSS, Atom, BibTex and RIS (EndNote) formats. It also closes a number of bugs. (Amongst other things we’ve used a zip format for the download that even Windows Vista understands!)

You can download the new release here.

The M2.2 release will add web proxy support, a preferences dialog, and an About box, and close the remaining small bugs ready for the 1.0 launch.

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