Category Archive for Ruby on Rails

New Features Added to ExhibitFiles

ExhibitFiles is an NSF-sponsored community site for exhibit designers and developers. Together with Project Directors Wendy Pollock and Kathleen McLean, as well as a dedicated group of advisors, Ideum has helped develop and operate the site. Over the past few years, we’ve seen the community site grow from a couple dozen people to nearly 1,600 members and there are now over 200 member-contributed exhibit case studies and reviews. Last week, we rolled out some new features, including improvements to the Members section,…

ExhibitFiles New “Bits” Feature

The ExhibitFiles Website is a community site for exhibit designers and developers. Almost three years ago now, Ideum worked with the Association of Science -Technology Centers and Independent Exhibitions to help design and develop the site. Created with funding from the National Science Foundation, the purpose of the site is share design practices and provide access to resources that can improve exhibit design. Last week, we launched a new feature called “Bits,” which best described on the ExhibitFiles site itself: A Bit is an…

Dawn of the Dinosaurs

Last night a number of us from Ideum went to the opening of Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Triassic New Mexico at the New Mexico Museum of  Natural History and Science.  We helped develop two computer-based interactive exhibits for this exhibition. The Fossil Viewer touch screen allows visitors to pan and zoom an image of large fossil block discovered at Ghost Ranch here in New Mexico.  There’s more about this interactive in the Ideum portfolio (see Triassic Fossil Viewer). The other interactive…

RSS Mixer Alpha to Launch in February

Last July, we posted a prototype Web application, RSS Mixer that allowed anonymous visitors to mix RSS (and Atom) feeds together. Back then the page got a lot of notice. There was a blog post from Mashable, one from CNET’s Webware, a brief article in Brazil’s largest newspaper, and literally hundreds of other links from all over the world. The prototype site continues to get traffic and it will surpass 5,000 user-generated mixes and added 10,000 feeds any day now. Next…

CNET Webware reviews RSS Mixer

Yesterday, Webware (a CNET site) wrote a nice post on RSS Mixer: “RSS Mixer stacks up feeds.” They particularly liked the Apple Dashboard widget feature and the iPhone formated pages. They even built and embedded a Web widget in the article’s page. RSS Mixer also received mention in Widgets Lab. It’s been nice to see RSS Mixer get so much attention even in its fledgling prototype state. The post mentions (as others have pointed…

RSS Mixer in Mashable, the Blogosphere

In the ten days since we released the RSS Mixer prototype, we’ve learned an awful lot. Of course, that’s the point of prototyping anything. However, the scale of the response (which was somewhat unexpected) has resulted in some hard, yet valuable lessons. In just the last four days we’ve had thousands of visitors and have served up over 10,000 pages. So far, visitors have created 600 RSS mixes which include nearly 1,300 feeds. All of this traffic resulted in…

RSS Mixer – Combines Feeds for iPhone, Web, and Apple Widgets

Our latest prototype, RSS Mixer, is now available. This is by far the most elaborate of the prototypes we’ve been working on over the last few months. All of these experimental applications are part of a larger project that we are developing for release in 2008. RSS Mixer allows you to combine various feeds into a new one that can be viewed as RSS, HTML, an iPhone page, as well as a Web and Apple Dashboard Widget.

Blog Analyzer Prototype

A few weeks back I wrote about a Web page capture utility that we developed as a prototype. We’ve just a built another application that takes things a bit further. Along with a screen shot, this new prototype pulls metadata and other information from your blog. If available, it can pull back the blog title, feed, type of software, author, description, and the date of the most recent feed. In addition, the Technorati Rank (via the Technorati API) and number of Yahoo! Inlinks are…

Web Page Image Capture Prototype. Try it.

For an upcoming project, we’re developing an application that automatically takes a snapshot of a Web page and produces a variety of thumbnail-sized images. This application was developed using Firefox on Linux along with some C programming and a little bit of Ruby on Rails development. Please try out this prototype: grab any site you like. Let us know how it works. Try the Site Screen Shot v.01 (Update August 6, 2007: We’ve taken web page image capture prototype down permanently. The…

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