News Tool Documentation
The documenation below is described on ASU's confluence site, http://confluence.dmit.asu.edu/display/sakaitools/News+and+RSS+Tool+Improvements
This information is intended to be used as a preliminary discussion of News Tool requirements, and a step toward analysis of the current tool state.
Aggregation Technologies
- Feedparser
- Rome
Requirements
Critical Features
- Compatible with Sakai 2.2
- Reading and parsing of alternate syndication formats
o RSS - all flavors
o RDF
o Atom - Read various encoding formats
o UTF-8
High Priority Features
- Aggregate multiple feeds within one tool view
Additional thoughts
- Accessibility issues
o consistency with current standard practices with other sakai tools - UI Issues - matching Sakai style guide
- Caching
o Do we cache?
o If we do, how many items per feed do we cache?
o How much space do we give over to caching?
o Is it really necessary? - Republishing feeds
o Should we allow feeds to be aggregated together and republished as OPML, XML, etc.?
Handling aggregation of feeds is only the tip of the iceberg with what can be done in terms of enabline feed usage in Sakai. Possibilities include:
- Various tools generate feeds
o Course resources
o Blog tool
o Discussion
o JForum
o Wiki Changes
o Announcements
News tool BoF, Austin TX
Attendees
- Dick Ellis - rwellis@umich.edu
- Jeffrey Barnett - jeffrey.barnett@yale.edu
- Andrew Petro - microcline@gmail.com
- Josh Ryan
- Jeff Beeman
- Bill Crosbie - bcrosbie@rutgers.edu
Others Interested
- Steve Githens
- Peter Knoop
Topics Discussed
- Should workgroup be under the integration group?
- Use cases should be propagated from integration, which will determine the immediate direction and workgroup status, etc.
- What is safe html to pass to the browser? - how do we deal with the html. It should strip out javascript..
- Snapshot feature - like bloglines "keep as new"
- Feeds of feeds
- Filtering feeds by keyword
- Caching - grab only permalinks
-
- Generic caching layer - perdiodic checking of the cached feed - don't end up beating up the feed server
- Check the confluence site for the social software session
- Should there be the option to auto-add feed items to resources?
- Users rolling their own feeds of content updates to courses, etc.
Authentication
- a huge random key given to each user for getting his / her feed
- key is attached to the feed url, giving the user the feed based on the key
- the user receiving the key is the "approval" to publish the feed
- as long as the feed contains no personal info, it should be able to circumvent any privacy, etc. issues
Use cases
- student needs for rss
- teacher needs for rss
- admin needs for rss
- start exploring senarios
Steps to move forward
- get a list of use cases - "What is everything we want in the tool" - then scale back
- develop design docs
- Begin dev