Learning Alliances

Automated Proceedings of complex Web Crossing events

Distributed on a CD or placed on another server, an image of a complex event is a great resource for study, review or reuse. It’s an automatically produced “proceedings” of an event that takes place (all or partly) online.

Originally developed for the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, we can produce a high quality, relatively low cost proceedings of extremely complex Web Crossing spaces, which include all the postings, enclosures, directory structure, clickable user images, inline images, user info pages, etc. Currently Neurons, Slide Shows and other unusual Web Crossing pages require some handwork. These electronic proceedings look like Web Crossing (e.g., familiar nav-bar or bread-crumb-trail and site colors) but most buttons (e.g., bookmark, reply) are supressed, as are text boxes for search, posting, etc.

The approach we use is not pretty and can costs around $1,200 the first time through. It is highly automated, however, so if the Web Crossing interface does not change, it becomes repeatable and inexpensive:

• CWToolkit has tools to identify all pages, users, images, and enclosures. A typical workshop has more than 350 pages
• Special macros use Web Crossing on a desktop machine to download all HTML and other objects to the desktop
• Perl scripts remove or translate hundreds of Web Crossing system calls