Readers unfamiliar with this theme should follow up the earlier articles related to The weblog as the model for a new type of VLE? We've now got our equivalent of the Auricle RSS Dispenser installed in PostNuke and I was looking forward to moving on to evaluating other aspects of this putative content management system. But I spoke too soon. The changes look pretty good in Internet Explorer so just a quick check on how the new additions looked in Mozilla and … I'll call it 'aesthetic diversity'. One of the problems is that Microsoft's browser may be the dominant application for surfing the Web but, apart from security aspects, the company doesn't appear to be putting any further effort into keeping it up-to-date. IE seems to do its own thing with regards to precise positioning of objects and so all sort of work-arounds are necessary to ensure that objects appear where you want them to in all browsers … and that equals time.
Another issue is that whilst PostNuke in IE and Mozilla is similar in appearance there appears to be some user-interface differences. For example, in IE, PostNuke enables functional areas (called blocks) to be expanded and collapsed (a la Windows Explorer) but in Mozilla the blocks appear in their fully open state with no collapsing possible, apparently. I'll need to investigate this further.
On a more positive note I've added a new module called MyHeadlines to PostNuke. MyHeadlines is like a supercharged Auricle RSS Dispenser but one which also enables the user to search for and add their own rss feeds. Why didn't I just use this instead of spending time with RSS Dispenser? Well, MyHeadlines is functionally richer but at the cost of being more complex. Also MyHeadlines doesn't appear to have the option of enabling me to displaying it's interface within the home page so users need to select a link and switch to a MyHeadlines page. I want to have the option of defining the context where RSS feeds, discussion e.t.c are accessed and displayed.
Anyway that's enough for now and hopefully I'll soon be able to move beyond this technical groundwork and be able to start exploring the educational potential of PostNuke.
