\nThe Devil’s Pulpit<\/a><\/p>\n
It is quite a very process which allows you to get good looking results quickly. Macworld<\/a> points out some limitations that struck me immediately.<\/p>\n It\u2019s dead-simple, but also quite limited. You can choose from a handful of themes to change the whole look of the story, but can\u2019t adjust individual fonts or formats, or even add a link within a larger block of text. (You can, however, place links as standalone buttons.) You can change image formats so they appear full screen, inline, or as a scrolling \u201cwindow,\u201d but you can\u2019t add borders or freely move images around. Video isn\u2019t supported at all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I guess slate is part of the same move to allowing producers to concentrate on the content while the ‘professionals’ provide the design. I am not a professional writer or photographer, neither am I a designer or coder (obviously;-)). Just as I am writing this I remember an earlier experiment A Walk to Loch Oss<\/a> using Odyssey.js<\/p>\n The odyssey.js library is being developed to help journalists, bloggers, and other people on the web publish stories that combine narratives with maps and map interactions. The library is open source and freely available to use in your projects. It is initially being built to work with most modern browsers<\/p><\/blockquote>\nWhat we gain<\/h3>\n
\nLike Medium<\/a> you cannot argue with the results from a clean readable point of view.
\nWe can publish text and pictures easily on a blog. I am sure we can find a theme or two with typography that is as good, but I suspect it might be hard to find such elegant handling of images.<\/p>\nWhat we lose<\/h3>\n
\nI publish ‘stuff’, sometime approaching stories, because it is fun and I want to explore the potential of these activities for learning. I have different degrees of interest in all aspects of the process, I think I can learn from each.
\nI’ve been thinking about the tension between ease of use and creativity for a while<\/a>. For learners we will sometimes want them to concentrate on one particular aspect of the work. I can’t be the only teacher who sometimes asked pupils to leave font and style changes till the story was finished. At other times we will want them to get fully involved in messy learning.
\nWe also lose some control of the data when we publish to silo sites. I am pretty sure that Medium and Adobe will be around a lot longer than Posterous, but I still like backups.<\/p>\nAlternatives<\/h3>\n