Touch Screen Systems in Context

Oct 19

posted by Roger Skalbeck in Multimedia, Kiosk, Site Enhancements Bookmark and Share

Following are two pictures of the library touch screen system we've "installed" in our two library locations.  The display systems have wall-mount capabilities, so we can build them into furniture, mount them on walls and be creative about how to use the devices.  For now, the installation consists of putting each monitor on a desk in a heavily-trafficed area of each library location.  This gives us a chance to see how people interact with the systems and plan for future content and installations.  If you come to Georgetown Law Library, please stop by to check them out.  The first one shown is at the circulation desk in the Edward Bennett Williams Law Library: 
EBW Library Touch Screen System

The other system is in the main floor of our John Wolff International and Comparative Law Library, where we used to have a reference desk:
Wolff Library Touch Screen system

This entry was posted on October 19, 2010 at 11:56 AM and has received 18258 views. Print this entry.

CFPresentation and CFFEED Proof of Concept Demonstration

Nov 10

posted by Roger Skalbeck in Graphic Design, Multimedia, ColdFusion Bookmark and Share

One of the powers of the ColdFusion 8 tag CFPRESENTATION is that you can create presentations from dynamic database queries. A type of query introduced in Cold Fusion 8 is the CFFEED tag. This takes a feed (rss or atom) and turns it into a query that you can loop over as needed. Pairing the two together, following is a simple proof of concept that shows a series of slides using an RSS feed as the source.

The source for this example is a feed of Recently Redesigned Websites from the site eduStyle: Inspiration for Campus Web Designers. This was chosen as the source, as the feed output is very uniform, presenting two screenshot images and minimal but predictable text in the source of the feed.

First off, following is the pertinent code showing only the necessary CFFEED and CFPRESENTATION elements:

view plain print about
1<!--- Select an RSS source for the CFPRESENTATION demonstration --->
2<cffeed action="read" source="http://feeds.feedburner.com/RedesignedSitesFromEdustyle" query="qryEduStyle">
3
4<!--- Using the RSS source, output content into a series of presentation slides.
5 Limit query to 15 rows to reduce processing time --->
6<cfoutput maxrows="15" query="qryEduStyle">        
7    <cfpresentationslide
8 title="#title#"
9 presenter="ColdFusion 8"
10     duration="8">
11 <h1>#title#</h1>
12
13 <div>#content#</div>
14 </cfpresentationslide>
15</cfoutput>

With this, it generates 15 swf slides, each representing a single entry from the feed source. If I want to do this in a week or a month, all I have to do is re-run the ColdFusion file and it will get results live from that point in time.

The best way to view this is to view the demonstration in a new browser window.

Alternately, you can also view an inline version of this presentation here.

This entry was posted on November 10, 2008 at 5:05 PM and has received 29878 views. Print this entry.