My Anthologize UX (Part I)
Saturday, August 21st, 2010Since I wrote last about Anthologize I thought I’d do some reflection on my installation & initial use of the tool. Rather than be a grumbly mumbly, I really need to start making some contributions to these kinds of project. Plus, I’ll be meeting with a colleague on Monday who is also interested in Anthologize. I thought it would be helpful for me to have run through the installation first.
What follows is a kind of “think-out-loud” exercise about my first experience with Anthologize. I intentionally did not read any of the documentation before trying Anthologize out – I wanted to see how far I could get just using it just based on the interface.
Installation
Although I already downloaded the Anthologize plug-in, there had been a lot of traffic on the development list. The dev team had already released an update to fix some of the initial bugs.
Anthologize installs like any other WordPress plugin, so I added it to good ole Inherent Vice here. I was a little wary about this, because I wasn’t quite sure how Anthologize would affect my regular blogging and plugins, etc. But since it was just a plugin, it seemed worth trying it (I’d backed up my database earlier in the evening before upgrading my WordPress installation to the required 3.0 version). Once activated, Anthologize added a new panel to my administrative dashboard.
Creating a Project
Under My Projects I created a new project, adding a title and my name as an author. I thought I’d use Anthologize to gather all the posts I’d made about my Collections Dashboard research.
After adding a project, I was presented with the list of “My Projects” which now included the Collection Dashboard Diary that I’d just created. It wasn’t quite clear what to do next, but as I hovered over the title of my project a sub-menu appeared. Project Details took me back to the screen I’d just completed with title and author information, nothing new here but nice to know you could change these after creating the project. I went back to My Projects and hovered over the project title again, selecting “Manage Parts.”
Manage Parts gave me options for Items and Parts. Items included a filter that would change which posts from my blog were displayed and a list of titles of previous posts. I assumed I would be able to click on the posts, but nothing happened. Apparently you need to first create a “Part.” After creating a part it was possible to drag posts from the Items column to the Parts column. It might be helpful to put something here that suggests dragging. This was a familiar pattern to me, but I don’t know if the interface makes it obvious that dragging is what was required.
Once posts were added to the Items menu, an additional set of links appeared. I clicked on the Edit link and was taken to the Anthologize edit screen. Here I was able to make changes to the original post – or so I hoped. I was a little unsure whether Anthologize would change the original post on the blog, or whether I was editing a copy of the post. The title of the WordPress page was “Editing Anthologize Library Item” - I took this as assurance that I wasn’t editing the original post. I added some text and saved it, but I went back to make sure nothing changed in the original post. Nope, Anthologize had made a copy of the post for me to edit.
The other option was to “Append” items. I presume that this would combine two blog posts into one Anthologize item – but I didn’t have anything I wanted to combine yet.
Exporting a Project
The only thing left to do was Export my project. Anthologize walks you though a several step process that lets you select a Creative Commons license (a very nice touch to have this built in) and add a dedication and acknowledgements section. Lastly you can choose from several different publication formats, page size (8.5×11 or A4), font size and type.
Here’s where I ran into my first problem. On clicking export I received the following error:
TCPDF ERROR: [Image] Unable to get image: /tmp/img_sm3Fuu
I went back and looked at the posts. None seemed to have an embedded image with a file path like that. I did have a Flickr badge in the middle of one post, so I removed it, thinking it could be causing a problem. No luck. I looked in the user forum but didn’t see an obvious solution. There was some conversation on the development group about a similiar problem, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the posts I was trying to publish.
I then re-exported the project as a TEI (with HTML) file which went without a hitch. On reviewing the TEI, I realized that the posts I was trying to publish had been written on a related blog for the IMLS DCC project and the embedded images actually lived on that blog. The error that had been reported in the dev forums had to do with remote images. Once I’d removed all of the image sources, the PDF was generated without a problem.
I created a new project and included several posts that I know used local images – these also exported without a problem. Since I often use the Blog This feature for Flickr to publish posts to Inherent Vice, not being able to include remote images could be a problem for me. I presume that images located remotely on Flickr will cause the PDF export to break.
This was my first impression of the Unable to Get Image problem. In Part 2, I’ll explore what’s going on here a little more closely, import some content from another blog. In Part 3 I’ll take a closer look at the default TEI markup.
