Today I spent about 15 minutes building a “newsletter generator” for one of my sites using Conversant’s extremely flexible tools.. This is a small thing really, but it is so cool to be able to create something like this very quickly with a minimum of fuss.
Here’s the background on my project. For several years I published a weekly e-mail newsletter about animal rights based on content from my anti-animal rights site. I’d usually just cut and paste articles from the browser to my e-mail client, format it correctly, and then shoot it to a majordomo program I had running on my server.
Anyway, when I switched over to Conversant I was way to busy doing other things and stopped the e-mail newsletter (besides the subscriber list got wiped out). Now I’m ready to resume that again, and the folks at Macrobyte came up with a way to handle the mailing of the newsletter.
But I’m still extremely busy, so why not get the web site to dynamically generate the newsletter content to reduce the amount of work I have to do? So after a bit of tinkering, I’ve got a newsletter generator running on my animal rights web site.
As you can see by visiting it, this is really just a glorified search page with some special formatting options. Type in the dates for last week (try 06/03/01 through 06/09/01) and up pops a page that will require only a few minutes of tinkering before its ready to go out to the newsletter subscribers.
What a time saver!