Free-Conversant News

What is Conversant?

Conversant is designed to help groups of all sizes work together by making it easy for them to share ideas, questions, files, and knowledge. It also has lots of features that make it very easy for a small group - or an individual - to publish dynamic web sites.

Conversant is software for your Internet (or Intranet) server. Standard features include tools for managing news pages and journals (weblogs), feature-rich event calendars, online discussion forums (with file enclosure capabilities), tools for publishing entire web sites, email and mailing-list integration, and many other services that are great for all kinds of business, project, and personal web sites and communication-centers.

Free-Conversant is Macrobyte's web site hosting service, based on Conversant. We offer everything from free sites, to inexpensive domain hosting, to dedicated Conversant (and traditional) servers.

What people are saying about Conversant...

This is the part I love about your software/company -- every time I ask a question, you reply with options, options and more options.
-- Brian Carnell

I'm beginning to use it and conversant is great. Congratulations Seth and Macrobyters.
-- David Harrod

The more I dig the more I'm impressed at just how well thought out Conversant is. This is really powerful stuff.
-- Duncan Smeed

Wow, This is what I called Super Charged Manila. Thanks for showing what is possible and great team work.
-- Paul Chow

Thanks, as always, for such a rapid response from the Macrobyte 'team'. You guys are great!
-- Duncan Smeed

I have fallen in love with your stylesheet tool. My intentions, however, are strictly honorable. I just did some things with h1, h2, and h3 even though I *still* don't really know how to code a stylesheet. Fantastic.
-- Mark Morgan

Conversant's Weblog II is incredible -- it's not done yet, but is already one of the most powerful online journaling tools around.
-- Greg Pierce
Power and flexibility! Five years, and I still can't get enough of this system.
-- Seth Dillingham

10/6/2000

Robots and Spiders

Seth Dillingham has a few things to say about (and to) the search engine indexers that have been crawling all over the Conversant sites in the last couple weeks.

Posted @ 11:51 AM

10/4/2000

A Flat Messageboard?

Mark Morgan and Brian Carnell, two of our most prominent (and avid) Conversant users, have repeatedly requested that we add a "flat" discussion system to Conversant, in contrast to the "threaded" or "hierarchial" discussion system that is part of every site.

We haven't had time to fulfill this feature request yet, so Mark worked out how to do it on his own, without changing a single line of Conversant's code!

Here is what it looks like in action, and here is his explanation of how he did it.

We're impressed, Mark. That's great work!

We're still planning a version that allows you to see a "flattened" interface and is managed by Conversant directly (rather than by editing your templates), but it probably won't be ready until the first quarter of 2001.

Posted @ 4:33 PM

9/29/2000

Don Larson on Labels

Don Larson has also done a great job of using Conversant's labels in a creative way.

He's combined labels with a custom search page, to produce a browsable archive of announcements related to his his Photography of the Mind images.

Great work, Don!

On a side note: Don's and Brian's sites have both been getting more traffic lately, probably due to the dedication they've shown to updating their sites regularly with fresh, interesting content.

Posted @ 3:49 PM

Brian Carnell on Labels

Brian Carnell has started putting labels to use on his sites, to excellent effect: he's built an automated "find related stories" feature with them, which we hadn't even thought of when we introduced the labels feature!

Posted @ 7:32 AM

His Lights All Came On

Totally out of the blue, all of Mark Morgan's lights suddenly came on. He'd been relatively quiet (few posts on his site, or on the support site) for a little while, and then suddenly he sends us this message.

Not only was everything he said exactly right, he seems to be the first person outside of Macrobyte to get the big picture of what Conversant is and where we're taking it. It's definitely worth spending a couple minutes to read it.

Posted @ 5:42 PM

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