Comments on: Teaching HTML with Hypertext Fiction

By: karl

karl — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:53:20 +0000

Good initiatives.

Why not setting up a Web server with HTTP PUT, and then using amaya to set you up in a scenario which is really using the full HTTP stack for editing.

By: Richard Milewski

Richard Milewski — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:30:42 +0000

Take a hard look at Patrick Taylor’s LeCMS ( http://www.worldlevel.com/ ) and la.plume ( http://www.mini-print.com/ ), these are very small CMS systems written in PHP. La.plume is only 30 kbytes (yes KILO)!

Neither requires a database, and both accept straight HTML as input mark-up. While very simple, both are quite elegant.

If they don’t fill the bill as is, either should be quite easy to hack into what you need.

I love your project. Please keep blogging about it. It fits right in with the “Magic Ink” ideas Atul Varma, Frank Hecker and Mark Surman have been talking about.

– Richard

…and I’m guessing you already know about Curriki.org? A great place to post your finished course!

By: ozten

ozten — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 05:42:51 +0000

@Felix – So I’ll have then write a “short page name” at the top of each of their sticky notes and the web app will have a first step when creating a new page to enter this short name. All links are ‘/shortstoryname/shortpagename’. Each page, when in edit mode, will have the short page name at the top so they can copy and paste it into their href in another tab or window.

By: ozten

ozten — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 05:35:22 +0000

@AndyEd – I did find Twine but saw that it was a thick client and didn’t research any further. Thanks for pointing it out, I did watch a couple videos. If looking very interesting, if your looking for Wiki-syntax and tiddly wiki type-one page publishing.

By: Felix Pleșoianu

Felix Pleșoianu — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 05:27:31 +0000

Looks like what you want is a wiki, only with plain HTML instead of wiki markup. There are wikis that support pluggable rendering engines, It shouldn’t be too hard to implement a ‘no-op’ one. That leaves the issue of links. Are the students supposed to enter the absolute URL, every time? Because I found that to be a PITA in my custom-made CMS.

By: AndyEd

AndyEd — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:06:18 +0000

Are you familiar with Twee/Twine, based upon tiddly wiki, for hyperfiction authoring? It’s really pretty slick:
http://gimcrackd.com/etc/src/

That said, it doesn’t offer a big opportunity to teach HTML though there’s opportunities for the overall template and individual messages.

By: ozten

ozten — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:55:44 +0000

@David thanks for the link. I’ll read the HTML sections closely. It’s tough to figure out what’s a good mix for a 2 hour workshop with 11-14 year olds where the focus is a writing workshop which also exposes a little bit of the medium of the web.

By: David Humphrey

David Humphrey — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:05:06 +0000

Not sure if you’ve seen this, but it might interest you: http://www.opera.com/company/education/curriculum/