There are posters and stickers all over campus right now, pointing people to the new UNow.ca site. The goal is to provide easy ways for people to keep up to date on news and events on campus. There's even a downloadable widget available.
UCalgary Widget
But, this widget isn't a Widget. It's a Windows .exe application. Leaving us MacOSX users out in the dark.
Except, we already have Widgets, and they're easy to use and create. I recreated the basic functionality of the Windows widget in under 2 minutes, including the time to find, download, and figure out the configuration of the Widget. Here's how:
- Download RSSBean from Apple's Dashboard Downloads site.
- Configure it with this RSS feed, taken from the new UofCZine site (which is what I think the Windows widget is using as at least part of its data source).
- There is no step 3.
UCalgary Dashboard Widget
I could have taken some time to customize a new Widget based on RSSBean, including UCalgary colours and graphics, but that isn't necessary. And might have taken an extra 10 minutes. Also, this Widget is free, required no committees, and involves no licensing fees or software maintenance contracts with consultants (I'm not sure if any of those apply to the Windows widget).
Update: I took a few minutes to whip up a more robust Widget. It's based on the News Reader Widget, and all I did was replace the default feeds. I've added a few of the Gauntlet student paper feeds as well, but 2 of them are currently invalid RSS so they won't display. I'll leave them in, just in case the Gauntlet folks fix the feeds. Here's a screenshot, and the downloadable version is attached to this post.
UCalgary News Reader Widget
By the way, by FAR the longest part of this process was just finding RSS feeds for stuff on campus. Hopefully that will change as more sites get using Drupal (and the template is fixed to expose RSS feeds).
There are posters and stickers all over campus right now, pointing people to the new UNow.ca site. The goal is to provide easy ways for people to keep up to date on news and events on campus. There's even a downloadable widget available.
UCalgary Widget
But, this widget isn't a Widget. It's a Windows .exe application. Leaving us MacOSX users out in the dark.
Except, we already have Widgets, and they're easy to use and create. I recreated the basic functionality of the Windows widget in under 2 minutes, including the time to find, download, and figure out the configuration of the Widget. Here's how:
- Download RSSBean from Apple's Dashboard Downloads site.
- Configure it with this RSS feed, taken from the new UofCZine site (which is what I think the Windows widget is using as at least part of its data source).
- There is no step 3.
UCalgary Dashboard Widget
I could have taken some time to customize a new Widget based on RSSBean, including UCalgary colours and graphics, but that isn't necessary. And might have taken an extra 10 minutes. Also, this Widget is free, required no committees, and involves no licensing fees or software maintenance contracts with consultants (I'm not sure if any of those apply to the Windows widget).
Update: I took a few minutes to whip up a more robust Widget. It's based on the News Reader Widget, and all I did was replace the default feeds. I've added a few of the Gauntlet student paper feeds as well, but 2 of them are currently invalid RSS so they won't display. I'll leave them in, just in case the Gauntlet folks fix the feeds. Here's a screenshot, and the downloadable version is attached to this post.
UCalgary News Reader Widget
By the way, by FAR the longest part of this process was just finding RSS feeds for stuff on campus. Hopefully that will change as more sites get using Drupal (and the template is fixed to expose RSS feeds).
Related
UCalgary News Reader Widget
Marc – I’m not sure what you’re talking about here. The widget I assembled (for MacOSX) is merely an interface on top of publicly available RSS feeds. That’s pretty open, and standard representation of data.
As for the Microsoft machine – it hasn’t steamrolled this campus (at least entirely). Our webservers are mostly linux (the ones I use are all MacOSX Server). But – the right tool for the job. As much as it hurts me to say it, people do need to be able to use Windows at least some of the time. True, someone was talked into licensing a Windows application to call the official “widget” – but so what? It’s extremely easy for us to reproduce the thing using open standards. What does it matter if someone also provides an easy application for those that use Windows?
Nice generalizations, though.
dnorman: I’m afraid you’re going to redefine “best” and “flexible” for your statement to be true. Although trying to read between the lines, perhaps that was, in fact, your intent. What is it with universities, whom you would think had a few more braincells available than your typical business, that insist on forcing people to purchase software from a company that has been proven (in several courts, in several countries) to be an unethical, corrupt predator? Whatever happened to DATA based standards? Specify the non-proprietary data standard, let people use that data using whatever tools suits their needs. UofC used to be more flexible when I attended. I guess the Microsoft machine managed to buy a few more university administrators? Pity they sell themselves so cheaply.