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

11/6/2000

Brian Carnell and Conversant's URL's

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.

Posted @ 4:41 PM

11/1/2000

Conversant Terminology 101

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.

Posted @ 9:34 AM

Making It Simple: Welcome Messages, and the Admin Interface

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.

Posted @ 11:19 AM

10/31/2000

Meet the Wizard

Friday night, our new Site Creation Wizard was installed and is now up and running. This is the first significant step in MISS month, which is our work to make Conversant easier for everybody to use (beginners and veterans alike).

Posted @ 9:32 AM