RNSoft: Ron's BLOG

OK, so I spent a lot of time getting the new Tutorial for RSS DreamFeeder ready. I wrote for many days and I tried to include much of my thinking about how I wanted RSS DreamFeeder to work. It is my hope that sharing these ideas will help you in your thinking about how to maintain your websites. I'm going to include a few key passages here in my blog so other folks might find it and read it and use it.

First, a bit about maintenance from the introduction:

An RSS feed is all about "what's new" -- the ongoing evolution of content on your website. As you grow your website, adding new content to a page, new pages to content sections or even adding new sections to your site, it is important that you plan for that growth. This is what we call the Maintenance Challenge.

To tackle this challenge you must address who is responsible for new content (you, your staff, departmental staff -- be very specific), what tools will they use to create that new content (Dreamweaver, Contribute, InContext, a database web interface), how will that new content integrate into the site, and especially what elements of that new content need to be repeated in other places (excerpts for the home page, title and blurb in a listing page, etc.). Its this last piece that can be the real killer in any maintenance plan. You have to repeat content to entice people to see that content (and someone will forget to do it at some point) but maintenance is easiest when the content stays in one place.

It is this inherent conflict that makes maintenance very challenging. The more you can automate content repetition the less difficult your maintenance task will be. RSS DreamFeeder has automation built into its core. Once a feed has been configured it can extract new content from your website with the click of a single button. One click and your feed will find the new pages, extract just the content you specify, build the links and reconstruct any underlying content linking so that they are absolute URLs and can be repeated on any website, assemble the new content with XML and store that content within your RSS feed.

This passage helps explain how we can get the job done with styles and templates:

In presenting an effective website consistency in design is a key element of conveying information. To do that task Dreamweaver provides both templates and style sheets. Templates control page structure and style sheets control the graphical presentation of content. These two tools allow content to be restricted in placement within the document (template regions) and adherent to a predefined visual order (style selection - also called classing). By making those associations between content and presentation we convey the relationships of content - because what something looks like is what something is (especially in an environment like a website, where there is little additional context beyond the page).

Most importantly, we can then use this relationship in reverse to identify content and its value. In other words, if we make a template with a box on it for a headline, on any page using that template when we look in that box we can expect to find text that is the headline for the page. Now here's the kicker, templates and styles leave an imprint on the code for the page, so if we're really clever we can programmatically collect content for our RSS feed by looking for that code.