University rivers?

[Ken Smith]

I would like to be able to use a river of news at my workplace, an eight-campus public university, and I bet other departments would too, once they saw it. 

The story commences:

I asked the IT folks the procedure for getting a piece of software set up to run on one of the university servers. They said there was some sort of fearsome screening and approval process.

Yet they didn't say no.

I'd rather not run a server elsewhere with all the servers my employer already has purring away in the basement. For one thing, it's a stretch for me, technically. But mainly, I think it's not my job.

So, my question today is this:

Should I start down the path toward getting approval, in spite of the warnings I was given, or is that just likely to be an insult or a hassle -- somehow, one way or another -- for Dave and the other good souls who share information here.

Any hunches? Many thanks.

I want me a river at work!

Ken

[Dave Winer]

Can't do any harm, I'm not anticipating doing any work for them though, unless they pay real well. 

--
GitHub repository: https://github.com/scripting/river4
How to ask for help: http://scripting.com/2014/03/19/howToAskForHelpWithSoftware.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "river4" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to river4+un...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to riv...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/river4.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/river4/25e182ae-6681-427a-a2f2-236f2e628ae8%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--
Typed on an iPad with fat fingers.

[Andy Sylvester]

Ken,

If you think having a university river would add value, you should pursue it. Anton Zuiker's river at Duke University (http://dukeriver.co/) appears to be running well. In his posts on the River4 mailing list, he implies that he has it running on a server at Duke University. You might contact him to see what issues he had to overcome on the IT side.

Another thing you might do is show the IT people some of the screencasts I put together for River4 (available at http://andysylvester.com/river4-resources/). 

Andy Sylvester

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/river4/CAB6FH9gEaBFu13h0cpHoSqbV-xUL1Kg4SpD%2BnV_6y782qFPO3w%40mail.gmail.com.

[Ken Smith]

Thank you for these suggestions and for the continuing good will in the community that abides around Dave's software work. I will bring a progress report when I can. 

Ken

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "river4" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/river4/gL7w_-Luq8c/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to river4+un...@googlegroups.com.

To post to this group, send email to riv...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/river4.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/river4/CAEnhznEb8ODApXemUthfCikCia2e2EPVOR0EdsBg5QU21GWgnA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Anton Zuiker]

Ken,

As Andy noted, I've created a river for Duke University. See http://dukeriver.co -- I check it daily, and am discovering much about my own institution. I love this tool, and am grateful to Dave and the community for making it available.

I have a Fargo outline explaining the project, with a few notes about what I've discovered along the way (mostly that we're missing feeds, and some feeds don't have titles). See the following:

http://reader.smallpicture.com/?opmlurl=https%3A%2F%2Fdl.dropbox.com%2Fs%2Fpd8n19j016mbydq%2Fdukeriver.opml%3Fdl%3D0

I decided to make this my own side project, so I didn't have to be delayed by explaining to anyone. I followed Dave and Andy's tutorials, and am using Heroku.

But, the more I show this to Duke leaders and my communicator colleagues, the more support I get. We're discussing how the university can take this on as an official project. I'm not sure why a university IT organization would put up barriers for you, since all we're doing is taking publicly available RSS feeds and combining them through River4.

I expect to have a blog post later this week announcing Duke River.

Anton

[Ken Smith]

Anton, thanks for this encouragement. I'll keep an eye out for your next posting and see if I can build it into my request from IT here as a link or an example of a successful use...

Ken

--

GitHub repository: https://github.com/scripting/river4
How to ask for help: http://scripting.com/2014/03/19/howToAskForHelpWithSoftware.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "river4" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/river4/gL7w_-Luq8c/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to river4+un...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to riv...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/river4.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/river4/9c7f50d5-9858-4cd4-b3e5-23701493aa21%40googlegroups.com.

[Ken Smith]

For those interested in my quest for the ability to run a river of news at my campus, this update. 

I was standing in line in the cafeteria talking to someone seriously high in the statewide IT department, and he said, "No, we don't really have servers available to people." I looked, I am sure, puzzled, and he said, "But faculty can request a virtual server." And information started spilling out from there.

So now I have emailed the right person to tell me more. I will report back.

Ken

On Thursday, November 5, 2015 at 2:52:46 PM UTC-5, Ken Smith wrote:

[Dave Winer]

It's worth mentioning that River4 is one of the few products I've made that doesn't have to run on a server.

My rivers are being built on a spare Mac I have in my apartment. The only part that's on a server are the static files it uploads to Amazon S3,. .Otherwise it's all running on a machine that's not publicly accessible.

Dave

--

GitHub repository: https://github.com/scripting/river4
How to ask for help: http://scripting.com/2014/03/19/howToAskForHelpWithSoftware.html
---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "river4" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to river4+un...@googlegroups.com.

To post to this group, send email to riv...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/river4.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/river4/bbff9dec-b62d-4898-885f-0a6580ad8719%40googlegroups.com.

[Ken Smith]

Thanks for that tip, Dave. It came at a good time.

It looks like the river I'm running on a Mac Mini here stops when the computer times out when I step away for a while--are people changing the sleep settings, turning off the automatic sleep setting? 

Ken