Beyond the Button

Maxwell L. Anderson, the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art published a manifesto of sorts about technology in museums this last year. Jennifer Trant, on of the organizers of the Museums and the Web conference says that his work is a key reason that Museums and the Web will be in Indianapolis in 2009.

courtesey Ard Hesselink
This Friday I thought I would post on some of the tools that our web/media group has been using lately.

Assembla

Writing code is hard. Writing code in a group that might not even be on the same floor, building, or state is much harder. Assembla is a set of the key collaboration tools that programming teams need, all rolled into one off-site package. SVN, Trac, a wiki, and even Scrum reporting tools. We initially used it as a stop-gap measure while we got our own SVN server up. Now we're finding it hard to tear ourselves away.

IRC

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has been around for a long, long while, but we hadn't really thought of it as a work tool until real recently. After two of our finest web/media developers returned from the 2008 DrupalCon, they informed us about a whole 'nother world of Drupal support and discussion living on the IRC channels. I tried it out for a couple of hours one Sunday I was amazed at how much live help was out there for some complex stuff I was trying to figure out. I'm on a mac so I use Colloquy to get on Drupal's IRC channels. Obviously this isn't Drupal specific. There are many channels for the topic you are currently banging your head over right now.

ScreenKeys

What's cooler than a button? A button with a little display built in. Screenkeys are little programmable LCD screens in buttons and switches. These could be quite fun for customized and changing content. The options for control in a game could change every time a visitor plays. We aren't using these yet but I just threw them in for fun.

Any of all those crazy acronyms throw you for a loop? Post a question about how we are using these tools and I'll try and fill you in.

Lots of us museum folks are thumping our laptops trying to get the cultural heritage and informal science world into the Web 2.0 technology age. But are we just buffalo rushing towards another cliff--a bubble perchance? I don't really think so but this video pokes fun at the idea and had me rolling on the floor laughing.

I especially lost it when I saw "friendship bracelets + newspapers" as their mock business because there is quite the black market industry in friendship bracelets here at our museum.