XplanaZine

Okay: I’m back in Oklahoma, after a great visit to Mercersburg Academy in Mercersburg Pennsylvania (I stayed at the lovely Steiger House, Belgian waffles for breakfast, I am SO spoiled now…). On Friday while I was there, we talked about blogs and RSS and syndication. The teachers were really excited about the possibilities, and wanted to know about the different tools available to them. Since getting home I’ve put up a kind of demonstration project using a very user-friendly tool - Live Journal - that allows individual teachers to easily create custom feeds of “daily” materials. In this case, a Latin story of the day!
Here’s a description of the project, and an explanation of the technology being used to support it. I hope I have covered all the relevant steps and options; let me know if I have left out something important.
Fabellae Faciles, or Easy Latin Stories. The goal is to deliver over the web a simple Latin story (really simple: medieval Latin! simple and fun!), with a new story available every day. I’ve prepared 90 stories, so we are ready to go for the next few months at least (plus I’ve got thousands more where those came from)… I want to offer a simple feed of the story text, and then have a webpage with an annotated version of the text, which is specially designed for beginning Latin students. This annotated version of the text will not be offered as a feed, although the feed will contain a link to this annotated version.
RSS Feed (XML). A straightforward version of the story will be available via an RSS (XML) feed. Do you want to receive the story every day in your aggregator? Go right ahead! And if your aggregator has an email feature, as WildGrape Newsdesk does, then you can also receive the story via email every day. LiveJournal handles this RSS feed for me automatically: http://www.livejournal.com/users/fabellae/rss/
Java Script. In addition, LiveJournal administers a java script that allows people to include this daily content on their website.

<script language=”JavaScript” src=”http://www.livejournal.com/customview.cgi?username=fabellae&styleid=276062&enc=js”>
</script>
Thanks to this simple script, I can have the content in more than one place - right now, I’ve got it running in the Carmenta.org site that I built to help organize the materials I prepared for the guys at Mercersburg, and also at Aesopica.net, where I will be keeping archived versions of the stories, including the annotated versions, along with supplementary materials for students and teachers. etc. (that all depends on who uses these materials and how I can make them most useful to any Latin audience out there in cyberspace!).
But what’s really cool about this is that anybody can have this content at their website, if they want. And the only technical skill you have to possess is the ability to cut-and-paste a script into your webpage. No special server side technology: heck, I even got it to run inside Blackboard. So instead of going through the unbearable tedium of posting announcements in Blackboard, I could just use this java script to “feed” a new Latin story every day into a Blackboard Latin course. I created an announcement in Blackboard containing this script; so Blackboard goes and checks for the latest story when it displays the announcements page.

Now, I’m not sure how many people are going to be wanting daily Latin fables to show up in their website or inside their Blackboard course… but if that is what you want, that is what you can have - absolutely: it’s my pleasure!
Most importantly, this is a “daily content” tool that any teacher can use - you don’t even have to know how to run a website! I’m using it in conjunction with a website, but you could actually run the whole thing using LiveJournal without knowing a thing about HTML or website design.
If you are interested in doing something like this, here is what you need to do at LiveJournal -
1. Create an account. LiveJournal does have free accounts, provided that you get a code from an existing user. They have a very eloquent statement of why they issue free accounts in this way. If you do not have a code from an existing user, you can get a paid account - it only costs $25/year. And there are many advantages to paid accounts! I would suggest that if you want to try a daily content experience like this, you should get a free account. You can try two months for just $5.
2. Choose your journal style. LiveJournal has a number of templates that you can choose from. If you are just going to be using LiveJournal to create an RSS feed of your most recent entry (the “daily” content), you do not need to worry about choosing a style. But if you are going to be using LiveJournal as the website where users will find the archived content, in addition to the “daily” content, then you will want to try out their different journal styles and choose the one you like best.
3. Create content. You will want to add content to your LiveJournal either by using a program that you can download and run on your own computer (available for all platforms), or by using the web-based interface at livejournal.com, where you can also create new content and update your existing entries online.
4. Get your RSS feed link. All LiveJournal accounts have an RSS feed, although free accounts only have a brief feed with a link back to the LiveJournal site - the paid accounts generate a complete feed including up to 25 of the most recent postings. If you want to determine the content that is being made available through the feed, you can create a “custom style”. For example, if you want a style that includes only the most recent posting, you can make a copy of my custom style #200433, or if you want just the most recent entry with the word “Subject:” suppressed, you can make a copy of my custom style #276062. (When you copy someone else’s style, it is renumbered, and you can then modify that existing style to your heart’s content.)
5. Get your Java Script. This is the script you can use to embed your daily content inside a webpage. You can use this script yourself, and other people can also use this same script in order to pull your content into their site. The script contains a variable that lets you format the content of the script using a custom style. This gives you the ability to determine just how much content is being made available with this script. (You can see my style #276062 in the script which I cited as an example above.)
And that’s it… is this the wave of the future? I hope so - because I’ve got plenty of proverbs and myths and goddesses to share, in addition to the fabellae faciles…

P.S. July 2 2003. I’m running the feed on a QUIA class page too!