Creative Commons and Indymedia
Many hours later, the Boston IMC is up and running at its new home in
Buffalo. The process was painful, mainly because the old codebase,
Active, was such an amazing piece of crap. I appreciate the fact that
it was innovative when it was originally put together, and it did the
job for many years. There is much to be said in favor of having
something that works now, vs. something that's great but isn't going to
be done until years after it's needed. But it's a shame that IMCs
didn't get off of it sooner, and that those moves weren't done under a
little less pressure; as it was, I suspect that there was lots of
duplicated effort working around the same data corruption problems.
Now that it's done, though, we get to enjoy a reasonably contemporary
codebase. One of my favorite features of dadaIMC so far is the
automatic Creative Commons licensing it provides for authors. Here's
what I wrote about it for the Boston newswire:
Creative Commons licensing is one of the many new features you may
notice on Boston IMC's new site. When you post an article to the
newswire, you now have a tool for allowing (or not) others to reuse part
or all of what you've written and uploaded. The default choice puts your
material in the public domain. You can also chose a traditional
copyright, which reserves all rights. But you can also do something in
between.
Rather than babble on about the options, let me direct you to two
entertaining (really!) and enlightening flash presentations developed by
the Creative Commons project. Links are below the article. If your
browser can't read flash files, check out creativecommons.org for an
html introduction to the project.
The continuing abuse of our copyright system by the media conglomerates
is extremely troubling. The Creative Commons group is building a
workable alternative, and I'm thrilled that the IMCs now using dadaIMC
software are taking advantage.
links:
http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/cc.milestones.121503.swf
[/media]
Layouts of online news sources
An immanent update of the codebase running the Boston Independent Media Center will require a new look for the site.
Here's how it has looked for the recent past. All the typical IMC
elements are present - a logo on the upper left, a banner image across
the rest of the top, some
nav stuff on the left, the newswire on the right, and main stories in
the middle. Things are all in boxes, and each article has a block atop
it with its category and date. Functional but a little clunky.
Here's the Barcelona IMC,
one of many running the new software that
Boston is moving to, dadaIMC. One of
the IMC techs has praised Barcelona as one of the few attractive dada sites.
Sadly, I fear this is true. The dadaIMC software has many features and
options, and every one of these has its own links and widgets, all
conspiring for your attention on the home page. Most dadaIMC sites deal
with all this stuff by putting it in lots of boxes, which themselves
live in blocks, which are arranged in columns... The thing I'm most fond
of with Barcelona's site is that the main articles and the newswire to
the right all share the same background color and are undivided by a
single line or box, which highlights the connection between the two.
After looking at these, and many other similar Indymedia sites, I
thought it would be interesting to compare a few mainstream news
sources. Here's a local corporate site, the
Boston Globe.
The color scheme is pleasing, links are obvious, and the content
isn't overwhelming. The downside to this is that the page goes on, and
on, and on; on my 1024 x 768 laptop, the page is 5 1/2 screens long, and
some sections of content don't show up until the fifth page! A dynamic
layout would help, as would a less ad-happy division of space.
One more example from Big Media: my old hometown paper, the Minneapolis /
Saint Paul strib (as it
is known there). They've made a few changes since last time I looked, most
noticeably shrinking their banner significantly. It's actually even
shorter than it looks in the thumbnail, as the lower part of the blue
stripe is actually navigation. Things off to the sides are seriously
boxed up, but most of the content is advertising-related so it's no
great loss. Again, the color scheme is pleasant and nonintrusive, and
it's obvious which text you can click on, and which you can't. Same
problem with excessive page length due to excessive ad content.
When the Boston site does get a new look, I'd hope we can combine some of the best features of these media outlets, and avoid giant stacks of boxes. It'll be an interesting challenge to see if we can combine the usability of the corporate sites' color schemes, font choices, and hyperlink decorations while still creating a distinct identity. After noticing the struggle the newspapers have, I'm thrilled that we don't need to worry about incorporating dozens of advertisements into the design!
[/media]
Thu, 04 Dec 2003
An immanent update of the codebase running the Boston Independent Media Center will require a new look for the site.
Here's how it has looked for the recent past. All the typical IMC
elements are present - a logo on the upper left, a banner image across
the rest of the top, some
nav stuff on the left, the newswire on the right, and main stories in
the middle. Things are all in boxes, and each article has a block atop
it with its category and date. Functional but a little clunky.
Here's the Barcelona IMC,
one of many running the new software that
Boston is moving to, dadaIMC. One of
the IMC techs has praised Barcelona as one of the few attractive dada sites.
Sadly, I fear this is true. The dadaIMC software has many features and
options, and every one of these has its own links and widgets, all
conspiring for your attention on the home page. Most dadaIMC sites deal
with all this stuff by putting it in lots of boxes, which themselves
live in blocks, which are arranged in columns... The thing I'm most fond
of with Barcelona's site is that the main articles and the newswire to
the right all share the same background color and are undivided by a
single line or box, which highlights the connection between the two.
After looking at these, and many other similar Indymedia sites, I
thought it would be interesting to compare a few mainstream news
sources. Here's a local corporate site, the
Boston Globe.
The color scheme is pleasing, links are obvious, and the content
isn't overwhelming. The downside to this is that the page goes on, and
on, and on; on my 1024 x 768 laptop, the page is 5 1/2 screens long, and
some sections of content don't show up until the fifth page! A dynamic
layout would help, as would a less ad-happy division of space.
One more example from Big Media: my old hometown paper, the Minneapolis /
Saint Paul strib (as it
is known there). They've made a few changes since last time I looked, most
noticeably shrinking their banner significantly. It's actually even
shorter than it looks in the thumbnail, as the lower part of the blue
stripe is actually navigation. Things off to the sides are seriously
boxed up, but most of the content is advertising-related so it's no
great loss. Again, the color scheme is pleasant and nonintrusive, and
it's obvious which text you can click on, and which you can't. Same
problem with excessive page length due to excessive ad content.
When the Boston site does get a new look, I'd hope we can combine some of the best features of these media outlets, and avoid giant stacks of boxes. It'll be an interesting challenge to see if we can combine the usability of the corporate sites' color schemes, font choices, and hyperlink decorations while still creating a distinct identity. After noticing the struggle the newspapers have, I'm thrilled that we don't need to worry about incorporating dozens of advertisements into the design!
[/media]
The White Stripes need a bass player
Or do they? Why not have it both ways, and more importantly make it easy
for the White Stripes to say "You want to add a bass track to our tunes
and share the results?
Rock on, dude."
I've been keeping half an eye on the Creative Commons project for a while, and have even licensed the texts on my blog with a CC license, but it's only now that I'm peeping CC's fly flash flick that I feel like I really see the depth of the project. All creative types are encouraged to check it out and think about sharing their stuff, not to mention what existing material is available for reuse.
[/media]
Wed, 03 Dec 2003
Or do they? Why not have it both ways, and more importantly make it easy
for the White Stripes to say "You want to add a bass track to our tunes
and share the results?
Rock on, dude."
I've been keeping half an eye on the Creative Commons project for a while, and have even licensed the texts on my blog with a CC license, but it's only now that I'm peeping CC's fly flash flick that I feel like I really see the depth of the project. All creative types are encouraged to check it out and think about sharing their stuff, not to mention what existing material is available for reuse.
[/media]
About (technical)
Time to collect technical meta-information in a post rather than jamming it in the sidebar.
The underlying technology is Rael Dornfest's blosxom which consists of a clever perl cgi. Part of what makes blosxom clever is that the base script contains only the bare minimum of functionality, and a plugin system is used to add desired features. At the moment, I'm only using a couple plugins.
First is a custom version of Brian Akins's archive. The difference in my version is that there aren't additional summaries of each year, which has the added benefit of making the generated markup valid. I've seen other unpublished versions of this functionality on blosxom logs, so I should probably submit my copy to the plugin registry and save someone else the coding.
Second is an adaptation of Matthew Gregg's swish plugin, which was an adaptation of the original lucene plugin altered to use swish++. I perfer swish-e, and so Gregg's adaptation was changed yet again. Still some work to be done on it - I'd like to shoehorn in a search summary, which would be particularly useful for searches that don't come up with any results. Time to read through the blosxom source in greater depth.
Say what you like about the design, it's valid XHTML 1.0 strict. No more tables! Good-bye, 1995-era technology; we're now caught up to 1996.
[/media/weblogs]
Time to collect technical meta-information in a post rather than jamming it in the sidebar.
The underlying technology is Rael Dornfest's blosxom which consists of a clever perl cgi. Part of what makes blosxom clever is that the base script contains only the bare minimum of functionality, and a plugin system is used to add desired features. At the moment, I'm only using a couple plugins.
First is a custom version of Brian Akins's archive. The difference in my version is that there aren't additional summaries of each year, which has the added benefit of making the generated markup valid. I've seen other unpublished versions of this functionality on blosxom logs, so I should probably submit my copy to the plugin registry and save someone else the coding.
Second is an adaptation of Matthew Gregg's swish plugin, which was an adaptation of the original lucene plugin altered to use swish++. I perfer swish-e, and so Gregg's adaptation was changed yet again. Still some work to be done on it - I'd like to shoehorn in a search summary, which would be particularly useful for searches that don't come up with any results. Time to read through the blosxom source in greater depth.
Say what you like about the design, it's valid XHTML 1.0 strict. No more tables! Good-bye, 1995-era technology; we're now caught up to 1996.
[/media/weblogs]
slag code: