annotation on a whole minute

Although I haven’t posted about Marginalia in a long time, I have been making significant enhancements. These were prompted mainly by work on integration with and features for the Bungeni system for parliamentary information systems. ...

I have uploaded the promised Marginalia annotation plug-in for Open Journal Systems. I recommend this for OJS users interested in experimenting with Marginalia. Beacuse OJS is easy to install and has such a clean plug-in architecture, I also recommend this for anyone developing with Marginalia who would like to see a clean integration with another system. My previous post on this topic discusses the new features. This version does not support IE.

I have released a new stand-alone version of Marginalia, my web annotation system. This includes many of the improvements made for the Open Journal Systems annotation plug-in (which I have not yet released publically). Among the improvements: ...

Although I haven’t updated Marginalia recently, I have been working part-time on integrating it with Open Journal Systms. There are a number of improvements and new features in the OJS version: . . .

I have discovered and patched a security vulnerability in Marginalia for Moodle. Anyone using an earlier version should upgrade to the latest release.

I have updated Marginalia to work with the current development version of Moodle 1.6. I don’t plan to continue to support Moodle 1.5.x as I don’t want to maintain two code bases. Furthermore, I figure most folks likely to try annotation will be running the most recent version of Moodle. The 1.5 release of Marginalia for Moodle is still available. ...

First, my web annotation implementation has a new name: Marginalia. This may drop my Google rank down somewhat for searches on “web annotation”, on the other hand it will give links to the project something to call it. “Web annotation” just wasn’t cutting it anymore. …

I just discovered another annotation project very similar to mine. HyLighter is a web highlighting and annotation research prototype for use in education. First developed in 2001, with annotation added in 2004, it shares the key features of my implementation: it allows users of IE and Firefox to highlight passages of text and associate text annotations. ...

I have uploaded a new version of web annotation for Moodle, with the following changes: ...

I have fixed a problem with the demo included with the stand-alone version of annotation. Database support wasn’t working due to an error in a path. This version also includes speeded-up display of annotations. ...

I discovered that my most recent changes to the annotation code had broken support for Internet Explorer. I have fixed the demo and uploaded new versions with the problem resolved.

I don’t plan such frequent updates, but important bugs are exceptions. I have uploaded another fix to web annotation for Moodle. This resolves an incompatibility between annotation and the Moodle forum rating system. It also fixes the width of annotation text entry box, which was previously much narrower than the margin.

I found a couple of problems with the annotation install. These have now been fixed. Anyone who has downloaded the 20050816 release should download and install the 20050819 version instead.

I have just released the 2005-08-16 version of annotation, both for Moodle and stand-alone. This release eliminates the dependency on Apache mod_rewrite and improves the documentation. It also includes the Internet Explorer support and searchable annotation summary from the previous release. ...

Since I last wrote about annotation for Internet Explorer, I have solved many problems (including the crash). That’s because IE has many problems. For a time it seemed I had a difficult choice between breaking my application and breaking IE, but I believe I have found a reasonable compromise. My explanation will have to be technical. …

I have tried to find a way to make my web annotation work in Internet Explorer. I wrote this to illustrate how painful and expensive it is to support outdated or poorly-designed systems, which description currently includes Internet Explorer, and to solicit advice. I have tried to avoid technical details, but I hope I’ve included enough that this can also help programmers who may run in to some of the same problems I did.

Participants in online forums often quote excerpts from each other’s posts. The problem is that a simple copy-paste operation loses the context of the quoted post. For example, a link back to the source post could be invaluable for both human readers and machine analysis and search facilities. As part of the web annotation project I’m working on, I needed to address this lack. I found a way to include such links automatically, so that normal copy-paste operations from a forum post include the title of the post, the author, the date, and a link. (You can see a working demo if you follow the above link.) But my solution is flawed. I want to explain why, and how work on microformats could resolve the problems. ...

I’ve been busy lately working on web annotation. I have produced a patch to add annotation to Moodle, and a stand-alone version suitable for integration into other web applications. Most recently, I’ve added a screencast of the system in action. I’ve also uploaded a simple Mandarin quiz web application which I use to teach myself Mandarin Chinese vocabulary. Feel free to try it.

Syndication feeds (RSS and Atom) provide precise information: the title of each entry, the author, when it was created, when it was modified, a unique identifier for the post, the content of the post without any surrounding menus, graphics, advertising, etc. This metadata supports many of the features of aggregators and blog search tools. But there’s a problem: the entries in a feed don’t last. Without a standard way to represent the information in HTML, it is lost to the Web. As far as I know, no such standard exists. ...

I have made a number of improvements to the web annotation code during the month of May (follow the link for a current screenshot). Since these are increasingly integrated with Moodle, I do not intend to update the static example for the forseeable future. …

While I’m working on web annotation for Moodle, I want the solution to be more broadly applicable. To that end, I have been working on making the service REST. A big part of that is developing sensible URLs, preferable ones that an ordinary human being can read and understand. I haven’t spent a lot of time designing URLs in the past, and I haven’t run across much in the way of good advice on the subject. One problem is that URLs shouldn’t change. This conflicts with the common Worse is Better practice of the web: first make it work, then make it work well. ...

I have added a few new features to the web annotation project, and updated the demo accordingly: . . .

I ran across this article on “newsmashing” on Kottke, which talks about a number of browser-based plug-in annotation systems. I considered such tools when I was investigating annotation, but decided against them and instead started work on a Javscript server-based annotation system. I expect I will be asked why, so I’m recording the pros and cons of each approach. . . .

I’ve started work on my web annotation project. I’m doing it under a grant from BC Campus as as an add-on to the Moodle course management system, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be modularized so it can be used elsewhere. I have uploaded the core of my annotation code, such as it is, to the Code section of this site. . . .

Recently I have been trying to figure out how to implement annotation for messages on an online bulletin board. Users should be able to highlight a passage of text, just as they can with a physical book. I haven’t found a good solution. . . .