We've been developing a prototype interface element for the BBC which
we'd like to release to the Backstage developer community for feedback
and improvements.
http://projects.hinterland.nu/bbc/sliders
It's a simple slider widget which allows for four RSS feeds to be
mixed down into a single list. Two sliders are used, the first to mix
two pairs of feeds into two lists, and the second to mix the two lists
together.
..
The focus is on the BBC website's 'Where I Live' section, and the aim
is to allow users to easily choose a balance of News and Local
Features, as well as balancing the mix between two counties.
Stories are given a value based on their order within the feed, and as
the slider moves across, low value stories from one list drop off, to
be replaced by high value stories from the new list.
Questions include: Is this intuitive? Does the data shift as you might
expect? Are two sliders too complex? Is a slider appropriate here, or
should something else be used? Is the sorting algorithm right? What
should we do about duplicate entries?
..
The application is in two parts, a Perl script which consumes RSS
feeds (using XML::FeedPP) and generates an embedded JSON array
containing the stories from all four sources and their rank.
Secondly there is a Javascript function to combine and generate the
list(s) visible on the page. Since the time course of 'News' and
'Local Features' differ so widely [news changing by the minute,
features dating back weeks] it was not possible to elegantly rank the
lists strictly on their publication date - instead we chose to simply
score them according to their rank position in the original feed.
In this prototype the source feeds are hard-coded into the script -
however this could easily be changed to use an external list.
Unfortunately the BBC does not have a very RESTful interface to their
local features XML, with no consistency in the URL format there is no
simple programatic way to access all the BBC regions.
