I'd like to wonder about how best to archive/collect/collate/categorize all these films.
So that
a) we can do it easily
b) it's easy to browse
It would be great if there were some kind of visual tool somewhere...
But on the other hand, I feel it's important to put this somewhere that we 'own', that'll last and that contains permalinks to the posts.
We could just go into the Ning group and copy out the HTML for all the posts for each day, from the page's source code.
But then what do we do? We need it to be searchable by Author, by date, by tags, by keywords, description text and be able to follow the threads of videos that respond to other videos. What else do we need?
We need a nice open source Content Management system. I wonder if there are Wordpress plugins that could help us. Maybe we don't even need any special plugins. We could just have a killer static front page(s) that allow easy browsing of all the posts by Author/Date/Tags, etc. We could put every entry in as a separate post, properly tagged and with links through to the original post. Then have a front page/front end that tells people how to search. It has a list of links for each Author's name, which takes you to a page with all the posts from that author (with feed links for this, too), a Calendar for people to click to see all the posts on a specific date, in the order that videos were posted to Ning. And a tag cloud. And a general search box. And all of us as editors. It's achievable with a basic Wordpress install.
Would take a lot of work importing 1000 posts. However, some of the work could be done using a RSS-to-Wordpress tool - because there are feeds for each day's thread in the Ning Group. However, these feeds only have the last 20 replies. Almost all the days had over 20. So we'd have to enter the missing posts by hand.
Then there are the people who didn't put everything on Ning. But there's not going to be a magic bullet for this. It's going to involve a lot of work however we do it, but at least we can automate some of the initial donkeywork.
What do you think? Any other suggestions for archiving methods / content managment tools or comments on whether and how we should do this?
Rupert
12/10/2007 6:22PM - Gena
I can look into free/open source content managment software but I'm not sure if it will be overkill for what we need. Some of the applications that leap to the surface are:
I think we should take a look at WordPress, there might be the built in functionality that we need to set this up as an archive site. I'm not so warm and fuzzy about Ning. There were features that I liked but for casual visitors to find us I think would be a problem. We are all scattered on a bunch of different sites. Some of us used permalinks, other posted directly into Ning or did both.
For the archive shouldn't it be viewable in the archive or if the vlogger request direct to the vlog post? Just thinking out loud.
"We need it to be searchable by Author, by date, by tags, by keywords, description text and be able to follow the threads of videos that respond to other videos. What else do we need?"
Do we need anything else? We can grab a hunk of Google search script but we can have most of what you mentioned in the sidebar.
I'm still mulling over the other stuff.