Museums and the Web 2009 wrapped up with a challenge to all the inspired delegates: use the energy and ideas generated here to get one thing done in April.  (The idea being that many small steps build momentum, and it’s too easy to ignore the small upgrades we should constantly be pushing out.)

Yesterday I pushed out a few small upgrades to our aging collection site:

You can now limit your search to objects that are On View

What works by Dan Flavin can you come see right now?

OpenSearch capable

Can’t get enough of our collection?  Add it to your browser’s built-in search box!  When you’re on the Collection site, you should be able to pull down your browser’s search field and add “Walker Art Center”.

Developers (Piotr!): you can now use the Walker collection in your Yahoo Pipes tool without having to scrape the results!  Not an API (yet), but a good step.  Check out the XML for ideas.

Bring it all together:

You’re a busy person.  You’d love to come see Chuck Close’s Big Self-Portrait, and you know the Walker’s got it in their collection, but you see it’s not on view.  You don’t have time to check our website every day, so how will you ever know when it goes on display?  Easy:  build a search that finds Big Self-Portrait, then turn on the “On View” flag.  The object disappears (not on view), but you can subscribe to the OpenSearch RSS feed for this query (click the icon).  Now, when Big Self-Portrait is available to see in the galleries, the object will show up in your RSS reader!  (note: I picked this painting randomly.  I make no guarantee about seeing it in the galleries any time soon.  :)

So, baby steps.  Get one things done that opens more doors.

#didonethinginapril (I tag Andrew at the MIA to get one thing done in May!)

For tonight’s The Art of the Book panel discussion, we will be using ustream.tv to stream the event, rather than Real Player. No fancy plugins or separate applications required. It is also free, and doesn’t require us to run our own Real Media server. It will also help us decrease the turn-around on getting a recorded event into the Walker Channel, iTunes U and YouTube. None of this is rocket surgery, of course. Other places, like The UpTake, have been using free straming services very effectively, we’re just a little late getting on the bandwagon. 

We’re doing tonight’s lecture is a test of ustream, and we will be working out any kinks. We’ve done some testing already, but haven’t used it in a live setting where anyone other than a handful of people have been watching. 

If you’re watching and run into any problems, let us know. Shoot me an e-mail (click on my name to get the address), hit us on twitter, post here, or join the chatroom on ustream.

Over time, the mnartists.org team hopes to use the blog to relay more behind the scenes information on the day to day running of mnartists and all the events and activities they take on. The blog isn’t meant to replace articles on the mnartists.org website, which will continue to be focused directly on arts happenings rather than the off the cuff meta-information that the blog will provide. We hope you’ll enjoy participating in it’s evolution and that it will add more dialog to the Minnesota arts community.

The Walker recently launched a new site in the educational area of the iTunes Store called iTunes U, Beyond Campus. Beyond Campus features a broad range of audio and video material from sources other than colleges and universities, such as American Public Media, PBS, the Museum of Modern Art, and Smithsonian Global Sound. Now iTunes audiences can easily search, download, and play Walker content just like they do music and movies.

For the Walker, this is the first step in a redesign and branding of the Walker Channel. Today, the Walker Channel is generally recognized as the webcasting branch of Walker public programming available at channel.walkerart.org. Future plans aim to redefine the Channel as the Walker’s digitally distributed network of variable content (largely rich media) that is made available to people through different mechanisms, both on-site (computer displays, projections, cell phones) and on-line (Walker domains and broader web).

Visit the Walker Channel in iTunes U

We were very pleased with the results of voting: Over 900 users registered to vote, and over 24,000 votes were cast. There was a flurry of voting in the first two days after voting opened, then a steady trickle, with another uptick before voting closed.

One cool feature in the project is the neighborhood aspect. We’re seeding three neighborhoods with sets of winning signs. Lindsey has more details about this in the ECP blog. To facilitate the community gallery aspect of the project, we’ve set up a signs map that we hope everyone who has a sign will use to let us know where it is. There aren’t many signs yet, but eventually there will be. To manage having many signs on the map, we’re using a handy google map plugin called Cluster Marker. This allows the map to automatically set the correct zoom level to see all the signs, but hide signs that would otherwise be too close together at a high zoom level. Every time I work with google maps, I am please with how robust and thought-out the map api is. It will be exciting to see the map flesh out as people add signs to their yards.

Time is running out to cast votes for your favorite yard signs in My Yard Our Message. Voting will officially close on Sunday the 27th. But in reality, it probably won’t actually be closed until the morning of Monday the 28th, since that’s when I’ll update the code and turn voting off.

Once the voting is done, it will take a little bit of time to calculate the totals, and prepare all the winning signs for purchase in our store. I have been hard at work at some slick mapping tools for keeping track of where signs are, and what neighborhoods have the most. Vote and stay tuned!

This morning I turned the site off for a little while to turn the voting on. Voting is now running and as of this writing, there are already 1100 votes in the past hour and a half! To vote, we ask you to consider whether or not you’d put the given sign in your front yard.

The site is using the django-voting module to handle voting, but I’ve modified it a bit. Instead of digg or reddit-style voting, where a vote up counts for +1, and a vote down counts for +1, a vote down doesn’t negatively impact the vote count. This relates directly to the question, you deciding not to put the sign in your yard doesn’t cancel out someone else deciding to put it in their yard. In this sense, voting “no” doesn’t impact a sign, but it does allow a voter to know they’ve already made up their mind on the sign. But unlike the ballot box, voters can change their mind through the end of our voting period.

Additionally, the order of the signs on the site has been randomized in an attempt to give each sign a fair shake. Odds are signs that are closer to the front of the order may see more votes than those at the end, so the randomziation is unique for each user. The randomization that I see will not be the same as another user. Additionally, voters who view signs anonymously will see a different randomization each day. This is achieved by using each user’s ID for the random seed, or the day of the year for anonymous users.

While it would be great if anonymous users could vote, even with proper protections in place, it is possible the vote could be hijacked by someone with a lot of friends to vote for them. To prevent this, users are required to have an account to vote. We’ve made it really easy to create an account, all that’s needed is an email address. I’m still working on the verification mechanism, so users who sign up today or tomorrow won’t get a verification message from us until then. Giving an email address logs users in immediately, so they can vote right away, but if they don’t eventually verify the email address, we’ll remove their votes.

I’ve played around with building a Facebook app before, but never had a clear strategic need to build one. I found this tutorial very helpful on getting my feet wet. For the moment, the app is written and PHP and talks to the actual My Yard Our Message site via json, rather than rss.

One of the things I am evaluating is whether or not I can set up a system to let people vote on signs directly from Facebook. Obviously, this would tremendously expand our pool of eligible voters, and would eliminate the need to force people to register for an account just to vote. During the building of the app, I went back and forth on the necessity of registration to vote, but ultimately decided it was necessary and laid the structural groundwork. However, I think I can get enough information about Facebook users to know they’re unique, track them, and prevent them from voting more than once.

This would require re-writing the Facebook app at that point, most likely in python and django for closer integration with the authentication and verification processing. There is some initial work done on a Facebook client API for python and django that looks promising as well.

Aside about Facebook pages

I’ve always been frustrated with Facebook apps that don’t work on Pages (as opposed to Profiles). After building an app, I have a new found appreciation for the applications that don’t work. Getting an app to work with pages isn’t really that hard, but it sure is confusing, mostly because of the lack of documentation. The only real documentation is a chat log in the Facebook developer wiki (no, I am not making this up):

(03:02:02 AM) swombat: ok, so basically, "Facebook pages is all transparent uses fbml blah blah blah"

                       "Oh but btw you need to build a completely different piece of code to handle this new type of user"

(03:02:18 AM) swombat: (not angry at you btw :-P)

(03:02:43 AM) fiveofoh: Yeah pretty much

(03:02:46 AM) swombat: this sounds really quite tedious and error-prone though

(03:02:50 AM) fiveofoh: Yeah it does

(03:02:56 AM) fiveofoh: Which is why I haven't done it on my app yet :P

So instead of just this:

$facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML('', $user);

$facebook->api_client->fbml_refreshRefUrl($process_url);

you use this:

if (isset($_GET['fb_page_id'])){

	$facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML('', $_GET['fb_page_id']);

} else {

	$facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML('', $user);

}

$facebook->api_client->fbml_refreshRefUrl($process_url);

Where $process_url is the page that spits out the markup to be shown on Facebook.

The wiki of terms has transformed into the lexicon found in the Worlds Away exhibition catalog (soon to be found in the Walker Shop). We thought the lexicon would make a great resource, so it was decided to build it into a larger exhibition website.

Site URL: http://design.walkerart.org/worldsaway/

The exhibition website is still a wiki, and you can help enhance and add to the terms in the lexicon. Each entry in the lexicon consists of a definition, a section for images, and a google map. You can modify or enhance the definitions, or add new terms we might not know about. Images can be added to better describe the term. And map locations can also be submitted to give a satellite overview for terms that may best be seen from above (cloverleaf, for instance). We also added bios for all the artists in the exhibition, as well as a few sample essays and excerpts from other essays found in the catalog. Additionally, the selected videos from our YouTube competition can be found on the video section of the site.

The design of the site is drawn from the exhibition catalog design by Senior Designer Chad Kloepfer. The book uses different paper and ink colors in different sections to compartmentalize the types of content (essays, interviews, lexicon, and topics). The site also takes the book or paper metaphor and uses it as the navigation mechanism, allowing you to always see the index for the other sections of the site.

I wanted to enforce a rigours structure on the wiki, not let it grow out of hand, and only allow public edits in the lexicon section. Like our other wiki sites, this one is based on pmwiki, which allows for a rigorous permissions system. We’re using a few extensions, extended markup (for footnotes), Google Map API, NewPageBoxPlus, and DictIndex (for the lexicon list). Pmwiki is quite hackable, and the skin we constructed makes good use of that hackability. For the animation and accordion, I’m using my favorite javascript library, MooTools.

Please take some time to explore the site and enhance the lexicon of terms.

Here’s a playlist of some of the great submissions we’ve already received: