In October 2009 I gave a presentation at the Upper Midwest CONTENTdm User Group meeting in Madison, Wisconsin. I discussed the Minnesota Digital Library's Social Side of Reflections and MDL+Flickr projects. This page gathers together a few notes about these projects.
First, here is a copy of the presentation in PDF form...
Notes on the Social Side of Reflections
NOTE: I would strongly suggest that anyone looking to implement commenting with CONTENTdm consider dmBridge. Our work below was a solid prototype, but dmBridge looks to have much greater lasting power and I'll be reworking our own commenting system with it as soon as I can!
The Social Side of Reflections report describes this project. We used PmWiki as the underlying engine to capture comments. These notes are not enough to do the same unless you already have a great deal of familiarity with PmWiki. But the code here probably provides enough hints to someone familiar with PHP for them to take a similar approach on another platform.
- here's the MDL-SSR website
- the code for the comments image
- these PmWiki "recipe" files handle most of the heavy lifting: mdlcache, mdlcomment
- we also use the commentboxplus recipe for PmWiki
- our Landing and Comments group local setups from PmWiki
- a couple lines for our .htaccess file to facilitate comments
Notes on MDL+Flickr
The MDL+Flickr project is described in the MDL Early 2009 Projects report. This project was really built in PHP, so no other platform is required. We moved the JHSUM collection to Flickr using this tool.
This scripts assume a filesystem with the following items in a folder called "mdlf"...
- the only JavaScript in the project is this MDL+Flickr bookmark to drag onto your bookmarks bar
- a folder "code" with our scripts in it
- flickr-config.php holds the configurations files for collections we know about
- flickr-functions.php holds some functions used by the other scripts
- flickr-batch.php handles the batch load and knows how to do a one-off as well
- a folder "phptoolkit" with the JPEG manipulation routines
- a folder "phpFlickr" with the FlickrAPI library
- a folder "cache" with our cached xml data
- a folder "images" with our cached images