Free-Conversant

We've officially dubbed November to be MISS month, which stands for "Make It Simple, Stupid". Conversant is known as being very powerful, but also somewhat complex and intimididating for beginners. We're going to spend the next month working to overcome that.

Actually, we're starting a little bit early! Very soon, possibly even today, we'll be installing a brand new sign-up process which will make it much, much easier for new users to start off with sites that have all of the features they want.

Of course, that's just the beginning. There are going to be lots of simplifications and improvements in the next month.

We've been very busy, as we worked on a number of new and improved features for Conversant, which have now been rolled out across all Free-Conversant sites. You can read the full list on the support site, but here's a quick rundown:

• Exciting new set of message macros
• Advanced Query Page
• Improvements to the fullThread page (allows you to easily implement a flat discussion group)
• New JavaScript and StyleSheet features
• Support for different MIME types, which was the last piece missing from the RSS syndication puzzle (or any other XML or plaintext formatted page)

Are you interested in syndicating the content that you post to your weblog? You can do it now, in Conversant, with dynamically generated RSS files. Steve Ivy figured out how to do it, with Conversant's existing feature set!

RSS files are used by services such as my.netscape.com and my.userland.com. Each "channel" on those sites comes from a RSS file served from someone's site. Now you can serve your own RSS files, and manage your own channel on those services!

Thanks, Steve!