Forum Discussion
Using Storyline to build portfolio site
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. I agree that there is an important distinction between designing the experience for a learner and presenting work to someone who may simply be browsing. Your examples have given me some ideas to consider for the human-facing side of the site.
The issue I was originally trying to solve, though, turned out to be slightly different. Changing the Storyline player, removing navigation controls, using thumbnails, or redesigning the landing page can improve the visitor experience, but none of those changes necessarily addresses the underlying web-crawler problem I encountered.
A human visitor can see and interact with the content inside the Storyline player, while Google and other conventional web crawlers may not readily see the dynamically rendered text, references, links, and media behind that experience.
I didn't want to abandon Storyline simply to satisfy the crawler, so I started treating them as two different audiences:
For the human: keep the Storyline experience, interaction, navigation, video, and learning resources.
For the crawler: provide a machine-readable companion layer containing a transcript, references, sitemap, and video metadata.
That led me to build a small PHP utility that I’m calling the Storyline Web Indexer. It extracts selected content from a published Storyline project and generates conventional web resources that search engines can access without having to experience the Storyline player as a learner would.
So I think we're actually looking at two complementary questions: How do we make the experience better for the human visitor, and how do we make the underlying learning content more visible to machines? Improving one doesn't necessarily solve the other.
I’ve now documented the experiment and shared the PHP source code, installation instructions, maintenance workflow, and security considerations on GitHub for anyone who wants to experiment with or improve it:
Storyline Web Indexer:
https://github.com/carmeltse/Ed-Tech-Solutions/tree/main/storyline-web-indexerThanks again for prompting me to think more carefully about the distinction between those two sides of the problem.
Carmel
Thanks Carmel, I definitely was focussed wholly on the portfolio key word, dismissing that part of the web crawlers.
One scenario I would be interested with your tool, if a day time employed SL360 user moonlights as a niche enthusiast/educator, with a suite of SL360 courses to provide to community learners.
It may refer to Kahn Academy pre-requisites recommended for enthusiasts to get the foundation to cover the niche science applications requiring an element of electrical engineering post-requisites.
If someone was on an aggregate engine with agents attempting to answer a query...
Perplexity, I want to create home automation using renewable energy sources and energy transformation storage or solid state capacitive discharge type technologies rather than battery technology that degrades. Are there any courses to help?
Then I'd want to see if my SL360 courses on such things with the pre-requisite knowledge and related vocational pathways are ranking with the help of the Storyline Web Indexer:
https://github.com/carmeltse/Ed-Tech-Solutions/tree/main/storyline-web-indexer
😉
Thanks. I still have to clean up the script as it is still tagging noindex for some of the content. I'd love to see how it would help other projects.