> Actually, I have another use case where I don't have the skills to > implement, yet. So, I'm maintaining a book exhibit on my MIT site: > > http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/books.html > > But I started out creating a similar list on my blog a while ago: > > http://dfhuynh.wordpress.com/library/ > > I was thinking, would it be possible for me to embed an exhibit of books > right inside my blog and feed the data from Google Spreadsheets?...
Yes indeed. I would venture guessing that it is not the skill you lack (I don't see how it would take any more than what you already did with books and movies at your MIT site, but clarifying what got you stuck might enlighten something), but potentially the all-important capability of adding a script tag to your blog page, a possibility I believe Wordpress might not have opened up for their blogs at wordpress.com (or which might be a feature for paying customers only, or similar). That script tag is the only enabler we need to make it possible, and being a property of the domain where you want to show an exhibit, it isn't much we can do about from our side, when not present. But given that, all doors are open to us. Blogger (while less aesthetically pleasing in other ways) is one environment which lets you do this, without hosting your own content. Google Pages another (but less relevant, not being a blog engine). > That way, we can make a lot of blogs host structured data while keeping > the editing interface as simple as spreadsheets. > > What do you think? Has this been done? How much work would that take? Right up my alley, and yes, in a sense. :-) Orchestrating JSONP services to repurpose an external site into some tool for your own innovative agenda is something I have worked a lot with the past year or so, in my case and to date mostly using del.icio.us and gvisit.com. Del.icio.us can be used as a primitive database with primitive filtering (SQL "SELECT * WHERE [tag intersection] LIMIT [up to 100]") functionality -- an ambitious example for adopting this to make custom blog navigation interfaces flourishing being Freshtags, which I have sort of mentored, http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/freshtags/ Turning Exhibit into a widget, either for stand-alone "applicationesque" use under a widget engine (such as those built into Opera, Yahoo Widgets, Google Gadgets, Apple Dashboard and friends), or web page deployed domain specific widget engines that let you drop in a pre-packaged made component onto your blog, google homepage or some other component framework. The open source Dojo toolkit is also worth mentioning on that topic, http://dojotoolkit.org/fast_widget_authoring.html I now realize this was probably your real question. I don't think anyone has integrated Exhibit with either of these environments yet, and I am uncertain about what kind of market share or user base categories they have, compared to one another. It is still a nascent field prior to cross environment standardization efforts, though the details are very similar across formats. Pardon the longwinded rambling. I'm leaving it in place, as I believe it might be relevant to some. -- / Johan Sundström, http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
