Day: November 8, 2000

There are two sorts of features that I adore about Conversant. The first are features that other software can do, but that Conversant implements better. The second are features that accomplish tasks that, to my knowledge, are next to impossible to accomplish otherwise (at least not easily). An example of the latter sort of feature that I’ve been using a lot lately is something called an advanced query page that searches specifically on bound URLs.

What the heck does that gibberish mean? Let me explain. Everything on this and my other web sites starts out as a discussion group message. So, for example, a few days the World Health Organization announced that polio has been eradicated in the Pacific Rim. I wrote up my opinion of this announcement and posted it as message number 843 on my overpopulation site, so you can read it if you want at http://www.overpopulation.com/843. Now because it’s an article I wrote it’s special (obviously 🙂 and I want to differentiate it from a message from one of my wonderful visitors informing how much my site sucks. So I bind the message to a URL.

In this case, for example, I’ve got a subdirectory called “articles”, subdivided further by year, so at some point I go back and bind message 843 to a URl that looks like this: http://www.overpopulation.com/articles/2000/000040.html. I’ve got a template that’s relatively easy to modify that tells Conversant exactly how I want my message to look when its displayed as a typical web page (and its these bound URLs that I submit to search engines).

So far this is pretty straightforward and very similar to what would have happened if I’d used DreamWeaver (except it took me a lot more time to manage things using DreamWeaver). Here’s where the fun begins. On the overpopulation site I’ve also got a page devoted specifically to polio information, http://www.overpopulation.com/polio.html, and probably another 100 pages on various topics from measles to the oil supply.

I’ve always wanted to include links on these topic pages back to the new articles, so the polio page would include links to all of the articles I’d written about polio. Sounds easy, but believe me it’s not. Ever try to keep track of this sort of thing when you’ve got upwards of 100 topic pages and dozens of new stories a month? And then do that on about 7 sites? With a flat HTML system a la Dreamweaver or whatever, it’s simply not worth doing.

Conversant, however, makes it extremely easy to manage this task. Say I realize I haven’t updated the polio page in a few weeks and want to add links to any new articles. I just got to the polio page and click on the most recent article to get its date. Then I just go to a search page that I set up to search only messages that have been bound to URLs, and in an instant I’ve got a list of any new articles that have been bound to a URL and contain the word polio.

This beats the heck out of the typical CGI-oriented search engine software which usually can’t differentiate between different types of messages. It gets even better because I can assign labels to messages. For example, one thing I do on a daily basis is compile a long list of hyperlinks to the latest world news stories for Overpopulation.Com. Conversant let me create labels, which are really just user-defined attributes attached to a message. For example, I created a label called “News Headlines” and when I create a new message just with news headlines from around the world I give that message the “News Headlines” label. When I actually write an article about some topic, I assign it a different label I’ve created called something like “Articles.”

Here’s the beauty of it. On the old site if I wanted to search for instances of the word “polio” I would have had to wade through page after page of URLs that contained the word polio but only in the headline of a hyperlinked story. Now at the click of a button I can tell Conversant to return not only all URLs that contain the word “polio” but also tell it that I’m only interested in seeing those URLs which are also articles that I’ve actually written.

I know I’m starting to sound like Ron Popeil, but that’s not all folks. I hate URLs. I am the king of mistyping URLs and am no good at keeping track of them. Conversant takes care of this problem for me. When I tell Conversant to take a new article I’ve written as a message and also make it available as a Bound URL, the software automatically creates a hyperlinked resource to that URL. Basically this means I no longer have to worry about what the actual URL my article from last October on polio was. Instead I can just type in the title of the article, put a pipe (“|”) before and after the title and Conversant automatically takes care of hyperlinking it correctly.

What I used to simply avoid doing because the amount of time and headaches involved, I can now accomplish in a couple of hours.

And there’s more still!!! On a site like Overpopulation.Com I’ve got close to 1,000 pages. One of the things I always wanted to do was add more internal hyperlinks, so if a visitor was reading my latest updated about the World Health Organization’s effort to eradicate polio, the first instance of polio in that article would link back to my main page about the crippling disease. That way people deep in the site could easily find their way back to more general, comprehensive information.

Again, Conversant takes what would be a nightmare of a project and makes it simple. All I need to do to accomplish this is first create a resource, which is very straightforward, and simply call it polio. Conversant asks me what I’d like to the polio resource to link to and I type in my main polio page.

Now all I have to do is search for the word “polio” on all the web pages on the site, bring them up for editing, and put a pipe (“|”) at the beginning and the end of the word. Presto — in record time I can have pages very deep in the web site that discuss polio point back to the general polio page, and I can keep this updated with a minimal amount of effort.