David Davies' Radio Weblog

An often overlooked trick that my assetManager tool has up its sleeve is a search interface to Radio UserLand's built-in RSS aggregator.

Back in the good ol' days when web services were trendy I created a web services interface to Radio's aggregator. Passing it a keyword returned a formatted list of all RSS items containing the keyword. This neat trick is invoked using a simple macro:

<%["xmlrpc://127.0.0.1:5335/RPC2"].assetManager.rssSearch ("keyword")%>

where "keyword" is what you want to search for. Add this macro to any weblog post or your weblog template to include a list of found items. You can even use this service to search other people's aggregators (if they allow it). All you need is the IP address of the remote Radio aggregator.

Try adding:

<%["xmlrpc://147.188.64.44:5335/RPC2"].assetManager.rssSearch ("rss")%>

to a new post in your weblog. You should get a list of RSS items from my aggregator matching "rss".

Here's a similar trick using Manila as a front-end to Radio's searchable aggregator.

As a postscript to my post last week, it's not that I don't think reusable learning objects have a lot to teach us about how e-learning might work. I do. Much of my effort over the last few years has been in some way related to RLOs. It's just that I have a dawning realization that what educational technologists think of when they talk about learning objects is not the same as what lecturers and teachers think. And I don't just mean the old debate about whether a picture is an RLO or whether a course is. I mean something much deeper, about the way people interact with RLOs, what they're for and how they work for us. What works in the real world of teaching and learning, and what doesn't. At some point I think both communities needs to start interoperating.