MicroContent News asks,
What is Macrobyte’s Conversant and what does it do?
- Is it weblog software? I’m confused!
Well, I use Conversant to manage this and other web sites and I’ve written a few things about Conversant, but the short version is that Conversant is a lot like a tub of Legos — it can do pretty much anything you want it to do.
Weblogs? Absolutely. Conversant will let you create as many weblogs as you want within a web site. This site has three or four different weblogs, though only the main page is really active. The interface is pretty straightforward with text entry boxes at the bottom of the weblog page.
But Conversant is so much more. I could go on for pages about all the features, but let me just highlight the two I use most frequently,
– E-mail lists. Conversant allows you and others to subscribe to your weblog/web site as an e-mail list. Anything you post to your weblog/website goes out to the list and anything you or anyone else posts gets posted back to the website. Once you use this, you’ll wonder why this isn’t a standard feature on all content management systems.
– Completely customizable metadata. The best way to explain this is to show it in action. Visit my animal rights faq and poke around a bit. This is a huge, dynamically generated topical index of all the content on that site. Everything there starts as a weblog entry and is filtered automatically to the correct categories using a system that is surprisingly simple to set up and customize. As others have noted, I’m pretty obsessive about the number of categories I use, but you could make this as simple or as complex as you want.
And I cannot emphasize how helpful this is. For example, jump to my 9/11 page which tracks all of the stuff I’ve written about the terrorist attacks. Plus, if you look at the right hand category, there’s a nice “Related Topics” sidebar that is, again, generated dynamically. It takes just a second or two to add or delete a category.
Whether they use Conversant or not, I would really like to see more webloggers start using some sort of system to organize their weblog entries. The basic weblog interface is excellent for seeing what’s new at a site, but it’s pretty rotten for finding topical information. I’d like to be able to go to somebody’s weblog and quickly find all the entries about Microsoft or Noam Chomsky or the RIAA. And I use Conversant because it’s the only software I know that lets me indulge my own category obsessions with ease.