Sky’s Blog @ The Dalai Lama Foundation — Spreading the word in a networked world

Putting “dynamic” content into every web site.

I’d guess that upwards of 90% of the web sites around today have more-or-less static content. They’re maintained by folks who use DreamWeaver or GoLive or FrontPage to build HTML pages which they then upload to their server. Nothing wrong with that, of course.

The big guys - the news sites, and online banking and financial servics, and entertainment, of course - all have “dynamic” web sites, generated on-the-fly using any number of criteria. We’ve done the same thing with the Dalai Lama Foundation web site - what you see (once you log in) is related to who you are and what you’re interested in. This allows us to make the latest and greatest information available instantly to all of our members!

But, just in the last week we’ve been experimenting with a technique by which we can take the dynamic information from our databases and our knowledgebases and allow that other 90% of web sites to integrate our information right into their pages. Without any bothersome programming required on their part.

How does this happen? It’s done with JavaScript - JavaScript is an “active” component of many pages on the web. For example, when you view a page where the graphics on the page “react” to your mouse by changing shape or color, this is usually JavaScript in action. (Though Macromedia Flash is a different type of component that can be used in highly-dynamic ways.) What we do in our new technique is to embed a small JavaScript snippet in the HTML page, to query our server, which responds in real time by serving up information customized for the particular visitor. We can serve pre-packaged queries (like “peace” or “ethics” or “Dalai Lama” or “Chicago” or “San Francisco”), or we can serve “answers” to visitor’s queries - just like doing a Google search, except that the search is on our own private database of information assembled to address the issues that are important to us.

Let me give credit where credit is due - the inspiration for the method we’ve developed comes from Phayul.com, which not only tracks the latest Tibet-related news, but posts it online and provides a real-time news feed which you can embed in your web site in a method somewhat similar to the one we’ve developed. Their method is described in detail online. They update their news once a day, and it’s available via this mechanism as soon as it’s updated. What we’ve done is to build a mechanism that, like theirs, uses JavaScript to pick up information from a server, but ours has been extended so visitors can perform active searches as well as fetching pre-specified information.

And finally, here’s where our volunteers (and eventually our paid staff) come into the picture. Over the past 5 months we’ve been building a Peace and Ethics knowledgebase which now consists of about 800 entries, which we will be able to make available to those 90% of sites for searching. Like-minded individuals and organizations will be able to benefit from our work within their own online contexts. (As well as building their own knowledgebases, if they so desire.) So we will need to continue searching out sources of information and entering those into our knowledgebase so they’ll become instantly available thru these great new technologies!

We need someone to help us build the knowledgebase now! If you’re interested, please take a look at our online postings of volunteer jobs now! These are unpaid positions, but we hope to be able to generate enough interest that we can begin funding some of them (at a low level to start with) next year.

What good is a discussion without an example? Right here in this posting I have embedded a knowledgebase query for the top 5 entries in our knowledgebase for “Dalai Lama” - you generally won’t see this change in real time, but whenever we do put new information in the knowledgebase, this page will update without any action required on your part or my part.