We made some changes to our Latest News system. Massive changes, in fact. The original news system we had up to now was used on this site to test and further develop the beta version of a plug-in we finally released called the “RSS Newsmaker.” This plug-in was developed for a free, open-source web Content Management System (CMS) we developed called the GreenBeast CMS. Now that development of the plug-in is complete, and the our RSS Newsmaker has been released to the public, we felt it was time to do a visible upgrade here so all could enjoy the benefits of this exciting new product. The system upgrades and features you may be interested in are as follows:
Automatic Article Archiving
You’ll notice there’s a new “Archived Articles” menu on this page. It is an archive of current and previous article titles. Click on one of the titles and you’ll have the selected article presented to you front and center.
Perma-Links
The article titles, as presented on the main news page headings as well as those given in the Archived Articles menu, are now permanent links. This means, in essence, that if you want to refer a link to a particular article from your website, you can now do so and the link will remain active indefinitely. Previous to this upgrade, article title links were temporary thus you couldn’t link to them without them quickly becoming broken.
Auto-Pagination
We still have automatic pagination if you want to peruse our articles that way — we configured it to print four topics per page. Look for the Previous page/Next Page links at the bottom of the page. Also down there you will find an RSS link which leads you directly to the raw form XML file used to produce our RSS feed. And speaking of feeds…
New “FeedBurner” Feed
To make it easier for people to subscribe to our news feed using their news reader/aggregator of choice, we have delegated our feed source to FeedBurner. It’s a nice feature as it makes the whole feed subscription much easier to the inexperienced by way of a refined RSS feed interaction page. Check it out, subscribe to our news feed now and get our latest news articles delivered directly to you almost the instant they are published. There’s no better way to stay up-to-date.
Image and Code Support
This new and improved system offers much better support to certain XHTML and basic image delivery. Thus, expect to see more images being posted here in the news.
Real-Time Authorship Data
We dropped the month/year which accompanied the articles’ headings/titles in favor of more precise data in the article attribution line which follows each post. This provides author, date, and time of the post. Thanks to the archive menu — which maintains itself automatically — a handy month/year reference is still available, and it’s actually much more accessible.
In closing, we hope you’ll enjoy and get good use from this system upgrade. If you have questions about this RSS feed thing, there’s information on our feed source page, or you may simply contact us with your questions.
Update: Since the site remake in 2007, the feed system is changed (for the better). Most of the information in this post still applies.
