Free-Conversant

Another new MISS Month feature on all Conversant sites: subscribe by email.

What is it? Well, Conversant "conversations" have always had the ability to act like mailing lists (as well as web sites and newsgroups), but until now it's been a little bit too difficult to sign up for the "mailing list" side of things. No longer! Now, it's as easy as it is with any other mailing list: just send an email to the site's "subscribe" address.

Read all about it on the Support Site.

If you'd like to try it out, you can sign up for the support site's mailing list by sending an email to its subscribe address. (Of course, you can unsubscribe just as easily.

Every Conversant site has what we call an "admin interface", which is like a really big control panel for configuring all the preferences, templates, javascripts, and other details of a conversation.

Today, thanks to Greg Pierce's hard work, we've made the admin interface easier to use. Preferences are now arranged in a tab-panel-like interface, similar to what is seen in many other applications, which allowed us to group the prefs in smaller, more focused sets.

Also, almost every preference now has help text which can be accessed instantly, with the click of a button.

We're not done with the admin interface, but this is a big step and makes it much simpler... and simplicity is our primary goal this month.

Tim Purdue wrote a brief article about a problem that many Content Management Systems have, and how to overcome it. The problem is that the URL's generated by many CMS's have question marks in them, which tells a search engine that it's a query to some sort of database, so most of them won't index it (they won't include the page that the URL points to, in their searchable database).

In other words, a site which is totally managed with such a CMS will probably not be included in the list of results when you search on any of the major search engines. Since a large percentage of web site "traffic" comes from the search engines, this is a serious problem.

While Tim explains some possible solutions, Brian Carnell has a better idea: use Conversant! All of the URL's for Conversant-based sites are indexable by all of the search engines.

Some people find the terminology related to Conversant a little confusing, such as:

• zone
• conversation
• group
• member
• page
• message

Want to understand them? They've been discussed recently on the support site. If you have time, peruse the messages in the entire thread. Otherwise, the core messages are here, here, here, and finally here.

We rolled out two improvements this morning for every Conversant site.

First, Greg Pierce completed just 10 minutes of work on the admin interface's "look and feel", and the result is less vertical scrolling, faster loading, better wrapping to the width of the browser window, and it no longer triggers a layout bug in the IE5/mac browser. Great work, Greg!

Second, members of Conversant sites will now receive a welcome message from the site's owner, as soon as they've signed up. The message is totally configurable, and should go a long ways towards helping people get comfortable with the services a Conversant site has to offer.