Happy Belated Halloween : Costuming your Content

Connexions now has two ways for you to dress up your content.

1. A fashionable mask

Connexions consortium members can add a touch of organizational mojo to their content using our new lens-based branding released on Halloween 2009. With lens-based branding, you create a lens, add your content to the lens, and then add your logo and a matching colored branding bar to the lens. Then ask your members and fans to visit your lens. Content in your lens that they visit after visiting your lens will retain your logo and branding bar. Readers we tested liked knowing who creates, sponsors, endorses or recommends the content.

Check out Rice University Press's branded lens.



2. A full costume

For those of you who want full control over the look of your content while still participating in the global education movement in Connexions, you can host custom viewing of your content on your own website. Get as creative as you want. You can see a demonstration of how Rice University Press' content might look on their website here. And below is a handy screen shot showing what it looks like.


To redisplay your content outside Connexions, you or someone you work with will want to know some technical information. Connexions structured format (XML) provides a clean and portable way to download and redisplay your content. We recommend creating a lens of the content you intend to redisplay so you can direct readers of the lens to your custom site and readers of your custom site back to the original versions in Connexions. You can also make use of the lens' atom feed to get a listing of your content, download the XML, and then use some cool transforms and styles to make it sizzle. Send email to our technical support team (techsupport@cnx.org) to get a link to a reference implementation to use for inspiration and guidance.