Category Archives: content

Creating, organising, improving content

e-Textbooks

Posted on 12 December 2011 | Leave a comment

A quick note on e-textbooks following up on a tweet this morning.

Site: http://www.kno.com/home
Only available to students with a .edu account at the moment (I think that was how Facebook got started). A simple sell: lighter, cheaper, and even easier. Cheesy videos on their homepage…

More about them on this AllThingsD article: Kno Taking Electronic Textbooks to Web, Facebook – Ina Fried – Mobile – AllThingsD.

Other companies  are entering this arena:

Also info at Hack Education from earlier this year.

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Posted in content, Education, HE

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Mittuniversitetet

Posted on 26 February 2010 | Leave a comment

Just back from a quick trip to Mid Sweden University (or Mittuniversitetet). We were at the Östersund campus which is a little further north than the two other campuses, Härnösand and Sundsvall.


View Larger Map

Ostersund (from the taxi window)

Östersund is described as ‘the number one winter city’ and it was certainly picturesque – covered in snow and fairly chilly outside. Yesterday was a beautiful crisp and sunny day so we got to see it at its best (although my taxi-based iPhone image might not convince).

We were guests of Kristen Snyder who was fantastically enthusiastic, knowledgeable and a very welcoming host. Along with her colleagues and Magnus Berger from Avedas they showed us their implementation of Converis - which you can see in action on Kristen’s profile page.

Kristen had also kindly arranged for an early evening meal so that we had time to catch our plane back to Stockholm. It was a good chance to sample the local cuisine so I went for the reindeer – which I can heartily recommend.

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Posted in content, develop, Work

More Drupal support

Posted on 15 April 2009 | Leave a comment

We’re currently using Drupal to build a CMS for the university I work at. It’s great to see it get more and more backing… 

From an enterprise level, Sett Gottleib celebrates Finally, Drupal Gets Deployment. His post points to Greg Dunlap’s work on a Deploy module. Sett also references the Drush module which can handle filesystem level deployment. 

At the university we have a similar set of requirements and have been developing our own mechansim (with support from a friendly local development company). I’ll provide links to our efforts as and when they’re available.

From a major player perspective, Dries Buytaert tells us Obama is using Drupal.

I didn’t know that Obama was also a web developer, but it is a great vote in favour of Drupal.

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Posted in content, develop

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JISC's a bit animated about IPR

Posted on 7 January 2009 | Leave a comment

Another animation from JISC. Not embeddable I think – probably due to some sort of IPR issue ;-) . Anyhow, here’s a screenshot that I’ve not asked permission to show yet…

jisc-ipr

Have you got permission to wear a hat like that?

They’re promoting a site called Web 2 Rights which has various toolkits which may be of some  interest.

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Transport Direct web snippet form

Posted on 16 May 2007 | Leave a comment

From: Transport Direct – tips and tools
This should get you directions to the Canterbury campus of U.o.K.

Transport Direct

Get directions by public transport and car with
Transport Direct.

Enter
your postcode

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Posted in content, develop

How to get thumbnails of webpages automatically

Posted on 20 April 2006 | Leave a comment

simpleapiThis is a great little utility/tool/hack called SimpleAPI. It takes a snap of a webpage, creates a thumbnail and lets you embed it on your page. They provide all the html code so all you have to do is copy and paste it into your page/blog. Why is this important? Because a blog entry without an image looks boring.

It doesn’t seem to like taking a picture of itself so the thumbnail top right is taken using Pearl Crescent’s dandy Page Server extension in Firefox. However, here’s this blog as seen by the system:

Don’t you just love those rounded corners?

The SimpleAPI thumbnail generator only seems to be able do 5 thumbnails on a page – which is probably a good limit for their bandwidth and servers. The site’s Japanese so I apologise but I have not read the manual!

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Posted in content, develop, manage

Create a content drop box

Posted on 27 March 2006 | Leave a comment

For a large institutional website, the demands to get content onto the site come in thick and fast. A ‘content drop box’ would allow colleagues to post content to be added to the site.

The fields are fairly obvious… it should:

  • Record who the colleague is
  • Ask who the owner of the content is – full details
  • Ask who the intended audience is. Any restrictions?
  • Ask where it should go – URLs please!
  • Link to policies where appropriate (if they want content on the homepage, does it fit?)
  • Ensure that a start date and a finish date are recorded
  • Ask for priority? (even though no one would say not urgent).
  • Allow Word docs (and other files) to be added to the request
  • Convert those Word docs automatically into HTML!! (in an ideal world).
  • Ask whether the content needs to be referred to from other places or highlighted in some way
  • Store all requests in a tracking database, and alert the team or the person on duty that a new task has arrived.

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Posted in content, manage