Small new app?

Probable reuse of events RSS feed or perhaps more directly from the data access layer: a screen in the Museum of London foyer to show the day's forthcoming events. We have most of what's needed to do this at present but need to (a) tweak things to show just the (remainder of) the current day and (b) to resolve questions of how to make it look nice, given that people aren't attaching images to events in the database at present, though they can.

Forthcoming project: Slavery

A project in the works for Museum in Docklands will involve mapping slavery-related sites around London. We had a conversation yesterday about how we might accomplish the content creation for this. There are complications relating to other parties contributing content, and possibly some UGC too, but essentially we decided it was worth pursuing the idea of authoring in XML (probably TEILite, actually) since the work I've done with the format previously gives a good foundation for developing the links between sections, outputting geoRSS or KML, building indexes and glossaries etc, which would not really be an option with regular MCMS templates. Will monitor how this develops as it may turn out that the benefits don't justify the extra me-time that will be required, but there's potential there.

Extensible, reusable, Impressionable

Ben from Surface Impression yesterday came in to install the new presentation authoring tool they have built us. Things went pretty smoothly (great bloke too), we sorted out a couple of wee PHP issues relating to the old version we still run and then it all seemed to work. It's a cool app, basically we have a couple of framework SWFs that draw together a load of smaller ones for different interactions - quizzes, fill-the-gaps, matching words and pictures, video etc. - into a single "presentation" for use on the Learning Online site (or on whiteboards). Authoring is done in the same context via a collection of other SWFs and underneath it all XML is authored. We will upload the XML and collections of assets to the web server once it's all ready and pass into the framework SWF the path to the XML and hey presto. It's similar to but much more complex than other Flash stuff we've commissioned in the last couple of years and the authoring environment is cute. I'm really keen to get my teeth into the XML, actually, since I'd like to see how else we can use what is put out - a simple HTML version of a presentation should be a cinch, anyway, and it will also be easy to cut-n-paste or copy-and-edit existing presentations to create new ones.
So, we're not live with it yet but it's looking good.