I’ve been playing with Furl some more and having some minor epiphanies as I go. I’m almost at the point where I think there could be some broad implementation but I’m worried that since it’s in beta it might just go away some day. What I’m thinking of entails quite a bit of setup. When Mike Giles of Furl e-mailed posted this last week it got me thinking…
Glad to see you are finding Furl useful! If you want to give folks an email option, they can subscribe to your archive (and can subscribe to specific topics). That way, they will get a daily email with the new links from the day before. Click on the “Share” tab to read more about it. Also, folks can search your archive at any time (and it searches the full text of the articles/sites that you furled).
Ok, now this is pretty mind boggling to think about. On a small scale, here’s what I’m doing:
1. Set up my librarian with a Furl account. She’s going to play with her page of Art links.
2. Set up a couple of Furl departments that she can sort the sites she wants to add into.
3. Use the viewRssBox macro to display each of these department feeds under their respective categories on the Art Links page.
4. Let her go crazy.
Now this is a very cool solution for a number of reasons. First, it’s easy for her; she finds a page she likes, Furls it, and it shows up on the library links site with annotation. Second, we don’t have to worry about that quirky WYSIWYG Manila editor screwing things up. Third, well, it’s just cool.
But then I start thinking about this on a big scale. What if all the English teachers Furled as they worked into the same page with various departments. And then what if an e-mail went out to department members on a daily basis to keep them up with what’s new? (And just think too, they could just get e-mail about the Shakespeare department, or the composition department, or…) Better yet, what if we fed the stuff into a collective Bloglines account? The setup to do this is huge, and frankly I wonder if it’s worth it. But it sure is cool to think about. (I have no life, evidenced by the fact that I’m thinking about Furl instead of getting my wife a birthday present for tomorrow. Sad…)
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