Every once in a while, we get asked a pretty interesting question – what does Burli Newsroom do that Burli NE doesn’t? After all, NE is the next generation, enhanced product, it makes sense that it can do everything that Newsroom can do, right?
Well, for the most part, you’d be right to assume that. NE is very powerful, and does a lot of things that Newsroom isn’t capable of. But in the quest to make it so, there are a couple of things here and there that we haven’t (yet!) duplicated in NE. For instance, we already discussed podcasting, and that’s still Newsroom-only. On top of that, there’s another gem that’s still only in Newsroom: use of Dropbox.
Dropbox is an online file sharing system, letting you upload and download files at your convenience – it’s one of the earliest and most popular cloud storage services going. And you can use it as a means of getting files into Burli!
Dropbox as a “Newswire”
Dropbox can be used to remotely send Stories into Burli by devices that don’t have any direct means of connecting to the Burli system. By saving your file to a specified folder in Dropbox (from literally anywhere with Dropbox access) it will appear in Burli as a Story.
For your convenience, we have separated Dropbox into two feeds – Dropbox Audio and Dropbox Text. Each appears like a separate Newswire in Burli’s Filter Tree. (Note that each of the Dropbox feeds is set to filter on file type, so Text files written to the Audio folder will not appear, and vice versa. Once they are in Burli, however, they can be combined, moved, and manipulated just like any other Story.)
Submission via Dropbox
Submitting a Story to Burli via Dropbox is very simple – just save a file of the appropriate type to the Dropbox folder specified by your System Administrator, exactly like any other file you save to Dropbox. All you need is the remote connection and the login credentials for the target Dropbox folder.
Whether working from a laptop or a mobile phone, start by writing up your Story in .txt format.
Audio files are even more flexible. As Burli can handle virtually any commercially available audio filetype, just make a recording in the format of your choice and save it to the Dropbox Audio folder. We see below a user with proper credentials for the Burli Dropbox folder from Voice Record Pro (as just one example) on an iPhone.
No matter how you do it, once a file has been saved to Dropbox, it will show up in Burli as a Story in the Filter Tree. Here we see our earlier Text Story in the Dropbox Text filter, ready to go anywhere in Burli!
A Text Story imported from Dropbox will use its first line as its slug within Burli – exactly like a Story created natively in Burli. An Audio Story will use its filename (minus the extension). So “weather.wav” will become a Story called “weather” in Burli.
Dropbox as a Destination
You can work in the other direction, too. Take a Story in Burli and right click it, and select Save As. You can save the file (text or audio) back to the Dropbox folder on your PC. Easy!
