In response to my previous UK YouTube / eGov 5-minute demo posting, Tony Hirst, who of course tipped me off about the existence of YourMinis, NetVibes, and numerous similar build-your-own feed-driven-portals in the first place, emailed me to ask about ‘how much advance prep’ was needed to make a 5-minute live demo, and where and how did I have those links stashed?
Heh, great question, and right on the nose: it only works live if it is well rehearsed! So here’s the behind-the-scenes story:
(1) the night before the gig I surfed around for some relevant feeds, bookmarking SOME but not all of them on del.icio.us/meisenstadt/egovernment;
(2) I did a practice run on YourMinis, using their great drag-and-drop interface to set up a decent-looking portal, and saved it with the name mentioned in my posting, yourminis.com/egov, then cleared away all the content to have a clean slate (from memory, this probably took an hour – which means in fact for steps (1) and (2) I easily spent a couple of hours on it!);
(3) an hour before the live gig, I set up the demo machine at the KMi Podium to have a Firefox browser pre-opened with a pile of ‘relevant’ tabs: to do this, I first went to my del.icio.us/meisenstadt/egovernment page, leapfrogged from there to about a dozen ‘relevant’ sites that I had already determined the night before, opening each in a fresh tab;
(4) Being something of a CTRL-TAB and ALT-TAB fanatic, i.e. using those keystrokes to cycle around quickly amongst open windows and tabs, I was able to navigate fairly quickly through the pre-set pages DURING the live gig, using the following sequence: (a) CTRL-TAB to ‘good’ previously-loaded page, e.g. one showing some eGov material or related news or info (like Police Auctions!); (b) find the ‘RSS Feed’ label or icon on that page; (c) RIGHT-CLICK and copy link (which gives me the URL for the intended feed); (d) CTRL-TAB or click back to the yourminis/egov page; (e) click on ‘Add feed’ in the lower left of that page (seen highlighted in blue in the screen grab at the top of this posting); (f) fill in the New feed portion as requested in the popup dialogue box (see highlighted in black in the middle of that screen grab); (g) click on the [SAVE] button; (h) drag the just-created feed ‘mini-window’ into a nice position on the yourminis layout. Then repeat the whole process for each ‘relevant’ feed!
Whew… ok, I ought to do a screen recording of the process at some time, which would be a lot clearer. Thanks to Tony for asking me about the missing steps. This ‘5 minute job’ clearly took a good few hours!!
[UPDATE: on the other hand, if your life depended on it, AND you remembered your login details and a few keystroke combinations, it is possible to recreate the entire thing from a standing start using a blank yourminis page and blogsearch.google.com or Technorati to bring up a list of 'decent' content, easily in less than 10 minutes]
Technorati Tags: yourminis, egov, egovernment, screencast
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