Who makes frogans?
Nowadays, more individuals than ever are publishing personal content online. User generated content seems to be taking over the Web with services which allow people to set up their own pages, spaces, blogs and mashups without having to deal with a lot of code. Still, there are plenty of folks taking the hands-on approach for complete control of their subject matter. In any case, the Web is an environment very much shared by commercial entities and developers, and by individuals publishing content pertaining to their personal interests.
Things will probably be much the same in the frogansphere of the Internet. While Frogans technology opens up plenty of opportunities for enterprises, the door is also wide open for people who want to express their personal interests, in much the same way as it has been with the Web, but in that ever-so-enticing frogans way.
The nature of your frogans is likely to be determined not only by what you wish to express, but also by the technical hurdles that you choose to jump or avoid.
Regardless of your approach, you’ll always start at the same place: with the registration of a frogans address (ex: “frogans*myname”). Frogans can only be viewed using the Frogans Player, which opens a frogans only by its frogans address. In your frogans address settings, which you can modify at any time, you indicate the Internet location of your frogans root directory, which is where the files that make up your frogans are stored (ex”http://www.myhost.com/mydirectory/”).
The table below shows three levels of complexity for authoring frogans and hosting them on the Internet, where A represents the most basic, hands-on, most technically challenging approach, and C the most passive, worry-free method.
| … | Frogans address | Authoring | Hosting |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Registration & settings | Hand-coding in FSDL | Upload to host by FTP or SCP |
| B | Registration & settings | Offline authoring tool | Upload to host by FTP or SCP |
| C | Registration & settings | Online authoring service | Server-side authoring app manages your files |
A For those who are comfortable with hand-coding, dealing with Internet hosting services, and who insist on having maximum creative leeway, they can author their frogans from scratch, using image processing software such as Photoshop or Gimp, and hand-coding their documents in the Frogans Slide Description Language (FSDL). They’ll upload their files themselves by FTP or SCP to their frogans root directory, at the Internet location that they’d indicated in their frogans address settings.
B With a little bit of patience these same people might wait for an offline WYSIWYG desktop FSDL authoring tool to show up. I know of one already that is under development, and I’d encourage all able developers to consider giving it a go (and to contact me for additional support if you’re interested). They’d still have to deal with uploading to their host’s server by FTP or SCP, but it’s not the trickiest part.
C With an online authoring service for creating frogans easily online, many hosting services could happily propose it to their clients. For instance, in their frogans address settings, the client indicates that their frogans root directory is on that host’s server. With all of the elements under one roof the hosting service can provide a user interface for authoring a frogans, as well as handling all the necessary file management. Even if the application didn’t offer all of the creative possibilities that one could have in hand-coding, it would sure be nice to author and publish a frogans straight from the web browser.
A service that will fall under this third category is under development at STG Interactive. The idea is to make it easy for anybody to publish a simple frogans right away while leaving the door open for them move on to other hosts and publishing methods if they like. Frogans will be created and customized from pre-existing templates. While the options will be limited (eg.: limits on the number of slides, links, images and themes), the results will be quick. And aside from the frogans address registration fee, the service and hosting will be free of charge.
Something that the social web is proving is that a great number of us have plenty of things to say, whether it’s about our interests, hobbies, work, schools, friends, or just about ourselves. And we’re continually open to finding a better medium for saying them. If it weren’t for that blasted learning curve!