Monthly Archives: October 2007

10/30/07

Are you paying attention?

Forget RSS … the hippest thing these days appears to be Attention Management, at least according to the geekgods who are developing the APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language). This is a standard that will allow users of super-available, but hard-to-track, information sources like RSS feeds, blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, etc., to categorize all their bits of information according to how important they are — to them, not to the publishers of the information. Imagine a virtual newspaper with headlines whose size you can customize depending on your personal interests, and you might get some of the flavour of what appears to be the goal here.

Say you’re interested in libraries, mashups, malamutes, and Britney Spears’ latest antics (okay, maybe not) – but are you equally interested in all of these somewhat random topics?

APML allows developers to create services that recognize the relative importance to you of all the information that can be gathered via the Web — and existing services are hopping on the bandwagon. Stay tuned, things could get even more interesting soon. Want to know more, or get involved? Join the APML Google Group.

10/11/07

Intro to CMS – WordPress.com

Here are some notes from the meeting on Oct 9, 2007:

  • Open source CMS for you to play with on your own: Joomla, TextPattern, Bricolage, Drupal, Plone, WordPress.
  • Look for more here: OpenSourceCMS – you can even try out some of the best ones there.
  • Want a quick, introductory, hands-on experience? Create a free account at WordPress.com and make yourself the administrator of a site – and don’t forget to blog, too.

Interesting articles and websites on intro to CMS and WordPress.com:

Other links you may be interested in:

Have fun! And thank you for all who joined us.

10/1/07

We're going to Infocamp!

InfoCamp Seattle 2007 – a BarCamp conference for information architecture, libraries, user experience design, interaction design, usability, user-centered design, and information science research. It’s October 13 – 14, in Seattle, and free for students. Speakers, networking, a great learning opportunity.

If you’re interested in coming, please email us at asist.ubc@gmail.com as soon as possible. It should be a lot of fun.

10/1/07

General Meeting Oct 9, 2007

Everyone is welcome at our next meeting – you don’t have to be a member to come.

Tuesday, October 9
12:15 – 1:15 @ TEF Computer Lab

We will be presenting two technology mini-seminars:

Intro to Content Management Systems – WordPress.com: Desy Wahyuni
If you don’t have any experience with Content Management Systems (CMS) this is a great way to get started. When working on a website that has multiple contributors, content management systems are key. This hands on intro will give you a clear overview of these systems.

Republishing RSS Feeds with Google’s AjaxRSS API: Jennifer Dixey
With the AJAX Feed API, you can download any public Atom or RSS feed using only JavaScript, so you can easily mash up feeds with your content and other APIs. For example, this is a great way to embed google maps into your webpage using javascript.

This will be an informal session on the above topics. You can come to learn, or you can come to share what you know. Join in the conversation. We will also plan on going to InfoCamp Seattle 2007 during the meeting. Come and join us!