gRSShopper
Stephen Downes, gRSShopper, May 23, 2008.


OK, here it is: the release, under GPL, of my RSS aggregation and personal content management software, gRSShopper. This release is numbered 0.1 and readers should take into account this there is still a lot that could be added to the software. That said, it's the tool I use to run all my web sites (it supports multiple sites with the same installation). I have created a demonstration site where you can go in and play with the site administration tool. I will be adding some examples of the system's functionality over the weekend. The source code is available on SourceForge and also on the gRSShopper site. I don't expect massive numbers of downloads or WordPress-like popularity. Rather, I view it as one prong in my overall research effort, a demonstration, in code, of the concepts I talk about in writing. But I will help people who are trying to install it (within reason) and I will continue to develop and improve the software - and will welcome contributions. (Hits Today: 0 Total: 1176) [Direct Link] [Tags: Project Based Learning, Research, Content Management Systems, RSS]

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Re: gRSShopper

Anymouse, May 23, 2008

Hey Stephen, yer linking to the domain squatting site above as a demo.

Cheers, James [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: gRSShopper

Ismael Peña-López, May 24, 2008

Congrats for the initiative :) [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: gRSShopper

Ismael Peña-López, May 24, 2008

BTW, the name's just great!! [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: gRSShopper

Anymouse, May 24, 2008

LOVE the name! In our family we have a term "grasshoppering". The best way I can describe it is:

Sometimes I get to thinking about something a person has just said, which reminds of x thing, which makes me thing of y incident and so on. Seconds later, I'm in a totally different place from the rest of the conversation, although I got there through a (ahem) logical chain of thought. The blank looks that greet me when I express something related to the place I'm now in, right in the middle of a conversation that is still where it was when I left it, well...

It's a tendency my whole family has. So we came up with the term grasshoppering to explain that thought process.

Other people just tell us we're "random"

I like to think your grsshopper is a related concept.

Karyn Romeis [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: gRSShopper

Trevor M., May 24, 2008

Saw the release note on Twitter and downloaded gRSShopper shortly thereafter. I had to supplement my perl installation, but am now part way through setting it up on a local machine in my basement. I am looking forward to trying it out and (if my perl skills aren't too rusty) examining different ways to work with the information being aggregated. Having a central location actively harvesting a variety of info streams will be great, but I can see it getting out of hand (I'm not disorganized, I just have high entropy). Not too long ago I was looking into Ontologies and knowledge representation and reasoning/inference tools. I took a good look at Powerloom out of the Univ. of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute. Potentially very useful but the thought of constructing an ontology from scratch did not seem like a good time, so I left it for a while. I started thinking about it again not to long after spending a significant amount of time in Second-Life and more recently on Twitter. In both places I experienced times where there was a constant flood of related information from multiple sources coming in. Even catching half of it led to some amazing finds. I began to wonder if it would be possible to find a way to use the slightly pre-configured information bits in these streams to flesh out an ontology more quickly. I suspected it might, but couldn't imagine how to wrangle all the information into a central location for further processing. Now I can. "By morning the wind had brought the gRSShoppers; they invaded and settled down in every area of the web in great numbers." Exodus 10:14 ~slightly paraphrased. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: gRSShopper

Gary Lewis, May 24, 2008

Congratulations, Stephen. Wonderfully generous of you to make this available. The amount of serious design and development work is obvious. Quite an achievement! [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

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