Collaborative Tools Project

Another of the things I'm mulling is how to research and prototype a narrative of some sorts, for a student project. In the past we've used Pinterest as a gathering research tool, to collect sources of inspiration and, kind of importantly, the visual clichés to avoid. We're not sure if Pinterest is the best tool to use. Some tools you should simply take a look at for the sake of it are: Amazon StoryBuilder to create a script or screenplay. This is like a corkboard of notes with which you develop your "story". And then there's Amazon StoryTeller that lets you create a visual storyboard from your script. Interestingly, the tool seems to recognise "people" and places. It has a huge library of people, and scenes and props with which you can create your storyboard pages, like the one shown below where Dr Cutie gets incredibly jealous of Greg's acrobatic cows. Ahem. The tools themselves are interesting enough, but the really interesti...

I noticed something on Twitter about the University's Festival of Ideas and thought I'd take a look at the events listing . Not long ago, the Web Office used to put microformat information in web pages so that I could easily add events to my calendar... Either they've stopped doing that, or it's stopped working, so I thought how easy would it be to grab the events listed and add them to my (or a separate calendar). In order to do this, I'd need to... Scrape the HTML from the web page and find the event data Connect to Google Calendar and add the events found Because I like programming in python, the first thing I did was to go get the latest copy of  BeautifulSoup , which is a library that is unbelievably handy for scraping data out of HTML and also Google GData  which lets me talk to Google Calendar. I so I began... import urllib, urlparse, gdata, time, datetime from bs4 import BeautifulSoup import atom import gdata.calendar import gdata.calen...