Another School Using Manila and RSS

"Here we go...very cool concept using, guess what...Manila (check out the yearbook link). Note the high school site and the news site: 'Who maintains this site? Volunteer editors. Each dynamic site is constructed and maintained by one or more editors. Look in the about area of each site to find the names of the editors.' AND 'Why are we using a content management system? It requires far less technical knowledge to publish a good looking site. The value of our network will grow as more and more people use it. Publishing is a simple way to start the ball rolling.'

Definitely an addition to the rolls!" [weblogged News]

I followed the link to the news site and came upon the following entry for December 5:

"WSAZ is reporting that Eastern (along with most other local schools) is closed today.

Yea Baby, it’s the first snow day of 2002. This is a friendly reminder to drive safely and watch this page for the posting of snowdance lessons to be offered in the elementary cafetorium. Dates and costs to be posted at a later date. – Chad Griffith - goto"

This is exactly what I want from the kids' school - a current news page that I can go to in the morning to see if school has been cancelled. I shouldn't have to wade through the scrolling ticker on TV, and while there are web sites out there that are aggregating closings, it would be far easier for the principal or the secretary to post a quick message to the school's site. Even better if it appears in my morning aggregator read.

Morgan Wilson (another blogging librarian) has posted online his current article on blogs and aggregators that appears in the Nov/Dec 2002 issue of the Minnesota Association of Law Libraries (MALL) newsletter. It's called Blogs and News Aggregators without the Aggravation (and Only a Little Serendipity). Another great link or handout (in addition to Steven Cohen's RSS for Non-Techie Librarians).

"RSS feeds for online library technology journals:

Ed Summers has recently created RSS feeds for D-Lib and Ariadne. The RSS feeds are available at:
http://www.inkdroid.org/rss/ariadne.xml
http://www.inkdroid.org/rss/dlib.xml (Thanks, Ed!)" [Chi Lib Rocks!]

And check out this very cool script that Devon Smith created to display various RSS feeds on a web page. To view the contents of a feed, click on its name. On the client side, it does require Javascript, while on the server side it requires XML::RSS, CGI and LWP::Simple. Devon even provides a link to download the source code.

This is a very basic version of the aggregation of Library System headlines I want to implement in our forthcoming grant software. You can see something a bit closer to what I want at ReadingEd.com. To view it in action, click on any link in the right-hand column that has an exclamation point after the name. [first spotted by Phil Ringnalda, via Too Much News]