Tuesday, September 12, 2006

RSS feeds

I've added a couple of RSS feeds from FOLD - one for changes to Module Specifications, the other for changes to Programmes. Links to these can be found in the about page on studentsonline - thery have tobe here because RSS feeds must be publicly accessible to be readable by aggregators like Google Reader and Bloglines. Adding these feeds was straightforward - about 20 lines of XQuery for the module feed.

The basis of these feeds are EditEvents. Currently only ModuleSpecifications and Programme Structures have EditEvents, but the concept can to be applied more generally, so that changes in, say Organisational Structures - membership of schools for example, can also be RSSed. A more difficult case is that of the base programme data - this is currently in a spreadsheet but that format is creaking and we need to consolidate that data with descriptive data into a singel programme document, whence Edit trails can be added here too.

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