13. Publishing Your Information

In the last chapter, we looked how to organize the information you gather. In this chapter, we look at how you go about publishing it.

Is there a difference? Definitely. As you might have noticed in the last chapter, a lot of the options for organizing and gathering your information are designed to be private. While you’re gathering, polishing, or just thinking about how all the bits fit together, you may not be ready to make it available to the public. The publishing aspect is when you have pulled something together—an article, a report, a book—that you’re ready to unleash on the world.

Of course, some of you might be doing research that’s not designed for perusal by the entire world. In this case, there may be a private arena—an intranet, perhaps—where the information can be stored. Or maybe the information is just for you. I find in this case that making an effort to summarize it—even if it only amounts to writing a rough article or an e-mail to myself—helps me understand the information I’ve gathered together and maybe even gives me a few more insights. Even if you only want to share your information with a small group of people, it’s critical to discover a good way to make sure the information gets where it needs to go.

You might think that when publishing information online you’re pretty much limited to one option: create your own Web site and publish your pages there. Seven or eight years ago, that might have been the case, but these days you have lots and lots of options for getting your information online.

I’m going to cover just a few broad categories here and not get too much into the details. The creation, care, and feeding of a Web site or another online publishing solution is way out of the scope of this book. I’ll recommend books and other resources as we go along.

The first option is a possibly unexpected solution—a plain old Word or PDF document!

Publishing a Word, PDF, or Text Document

It may seem counterintuitive to focus on “office” documents when we’re discussing the Web, but you can easily publish the information you’ve gathered to generate a report and simply upload it to your corporate or institutional Web site. This works equally well for Word documents, PDF documents, or TXT documents. More obscure formatting (like WordPerfect or other word processors) might be a little harder for people to read.

Pros

• If you’re already generating Word or PDF documents for consumption in your office, publishing those file formats directly to a Web site saves you from having to generate something else for the Web.

• Because you’re not hampered with design or having to integrate your information into an already existing structure, making a Word or PDF document can be a lot faster.

• The people who find your document can easily print it out, save it to their own hard drives, or move it somewhere else to peruse at their leisure (which can sometimes be tough with multi-page Web sites).

Cons

• If you’re not already generating a report for the offline set, this method will in fact be an extra step.

• Search engines, while they’re okay at indexing Word, text, and PDF documents, are pretty awful at formatting them—your carefully crafted report may end up looking at bit spastic through Google’s “view as HTML” lens.

• Standalone reports can also be a bear to update, and it’s tough to inform users that you’ve got a report that has more information than the report they viewed last week (it’s a little easier to see the updates on a Web site). As far as I know, you can’t publish an RSS feed from a Word document. And in my experience, it’s a little tougher to find a standalone document like a PDF file than it is a Web site.

Essentials

The essentials for posting these kinds of documents are pretty simple: make a document in your favorite (preferably popular) word processor and upload it to a Web site! The following tips may help you ensure your document survives the translation into HTML by a search engine without getting mangled:

• Use as little formatting as possible.

• One column beats two columns. Sometimes if you format your content in two columns, the search engine has a hard time indexing it and presenting it in a readable format.

• Fewer pictures are, in my experience, better than a lot of pictures. Try to reserve pictures for when illustration of a point is really necessary.

Now let’s look at a more Internet-oriented solution: using a mailing list to broadcast your research.

Publishing to a Mailing List

If you’re doing research that’s ongoing, or you don’t want to go to the trouble of creating and organizing an entire Web site, you may want to consider publishing to a mailing list. It doesn’t need to cost you anything; there are plenty of free mailing list services out there to which you can publish your research.

Pros

• Getting your information out there is as easy as writing an e-mail message. You don’t have to worry about fancy formatting, or page creation, or anything like that.

• People can get updates to your research in e-mail instead of having to remember to visit your site (or put a page monitor on it).

• You might find it easier to incorporate sending out a regular e-mail into your routine than updating a Web site.

• People who don’t have particularly fast connections can download a plain-text e-mail far faster than they can visit a Web site.

Cons

• If you want to add fancy content to a Web site (like Flash media, audio, and polls), you won’t find plain-text e-mails useful.

• It can be difficult to organize information within a mailing list.

• So many people have spam traps nowadays you may find that your information is not getting to them or you may be accused of being a spammer. It’s amazing how often this can happen—people will forget they subscribed to a list, have someone who shares e-mail with them subscribe to a list, not want to bother to learn how to unsubscribe so they take a shortcut by accusing you of spamming, and so on.

• Having to administer a mailing list can be time consuming and tedious.

• It’s sometimes difficult for someone who wants to learn more about your research to visit a mailing list archive in order to get up to speed.

Essentials

Even if you can’t stand the idea of using a mailing list to publish your information, you might want to consider creating a mailing list in conjunction with a Web site or wiki. I’ve had a Web site for ResearchBuzz for over eight years, but many people would rather get a weekly newsletter with a summary of what’s on the Web site. Sometimes it’s because they don’t want to visit the site regularly; sometimes it’s so they can pass around interesting bits via e-mail, and sometimes it’s because they want to print out interesting bits and keep them.

When you have a mailing list, you can have either a discussion group or an announcement-only list. Newsletters are announcement-only lists. Discussion groups allow the readers to discuss your research, add opinions of their own, and even contribute to what you’ve found. You’ll have to be careful, though—leading a bunch of people in a discussion often leads to a lot of refereeing and damping down of flame wars. Unless you’re creating a list for a small group of people, stick to announcement lists.

Free mailing lists

If you’d like to start a mailing list, you have some free options to choose from. There are a few pay options as well. One thing I would not suggest, unless you’re a big geek with a lot of free time, is setting up your own mailing server. You’ll have to deal with things like people accusing you of spamming, accidentally getting on blacklists, and making sure that your server doesn’t get cracked. By using a hosted solution, you let somebody else handle all that hassle, while you can concentrate on publishing your research and getting it out there!

Google Groups

Google Groups (groups.google.com) is a free mailing list service, though you must have a Google account to create a mailing list. Once you’re logged in and choose to create a group, you’ll be asked to set up a group name and e-mail address, as well as a description. (There’s also a switch to tag if the group should be considered “adults only.”)

You have three access options: public (anybody can read and post), announcement-only (anybody can read, only the moderator can post—this is the setting for newsletters), and restricted (reading and posting are private and by invitation only). List archives are not searchable and do not show in Google Groups search results (Figure 14.1).

Figure 14.1. Setting up a Google Group is a one-screen process.

Yahoo Groups

You need to have a Yahoo account to set up a new Yahoo Group (groups.yahoo.com), and instead of a single-page setup like Google Groups, it uses a multi-page, stepped setup. You must specify the category of the group, which you can do by either browsing or searching Yahoo Group’s directory structure (Figure 14.2).

Figure 14.2. Setting up a Yahoo Group is a multi-step process, but it gives you immediate control over things like categorization.

After specifying the category, you need to name the group, enter a group e-mail address, and describe your group. (This page is the one that looks very much like the similar Google Groups page.) Then you are asked to specify the e-mail address at which you’d like to receive messages from the group and the Yahoo Profile that you’d like visitors to the new list to see. Finally, you must echo a random string of numbers and letters to prove you’re not a robot trying to set up a mailing list.

Free mailing lists are, well, free, but you do run the risk of having random, unrelated advertising shoved in your newsletter. In addition, the support isn’t that great. If you’re looking for an advertising-free option that offers fairly good support and a little more functionality, your best bet is to go for a paid mailing list service. Don’t worry though—they’re not particularly expensive.

Paid mailing lists

There are lots of paid mailing list services out there. I’m going to cover two that I’m fairly familiar with, and then give you a pointer to where you can find many, many more. Let’s start with NetAtlantic.

Net Atlantic

Net Atlantic (netatlantic.com) hosts the ResearchBuzz mailing list. It has three levels of service for the announcement lists that you would use to send out newsletters—one starting at $15 a month, one starting at $30 a month, and one starting at $60 a month.

For the basic cost, you can usually get a certain amount of bandwidth with which to send out newsletters. You will be charged for any bandwidth you take up over and above that set amount. The higher-priced lists have a few more features, including the ability to try to resend messages as well as send them a little faster. These features are not absolutely necessary.

While learning your way around a list interface can be a little intimidating at first, it’s not that hard. Note with Net Atlantic, you can set up documents that are mailed to users when they subscribe and unsubscribe, get daily (or weekly or monthly) subscription reports, and be able to watch the delivery progress of your newsletter (there’s always some address that gets hung up or otherwise blocked so you can’t deliver to it). I find Net Atlantic’s support folks prompt and fairly helpful.

Sparklist

Sparklist (sparklist.com) is a little more expensive than Net Atlantic. It seems to be designed for larger clients. Its packages start at $50 a month for a discussion group and $100 for an announcement list. (The big difference? Discussion lists have a maximum of 2,000 members.)

If you’re interested in marketing with your newsletter, Sparklist offers a lot of tools for tracking and reporting the activity of your readers. (What they click on, when they open it, and so on. Note that these tools only work with HTML newsletters.) Like Net Atlantic, you can also get subscribe and unsubscribe reports, as well as support from real people.

Whether you choose one of these services or an entirely different paid service, be forewarned that they often make strong recommendations about how to handle your online newsletter—like making sure it’s a confirmed subscription list (they may even require it). They may also strongly suggest that you keep an unsubscribe link within the body of your newsletter to conform to federal guidelines (or again, they may just require it of you). Please be sure to follow all these directives; doing so makes you a better Internet citizen and makes it easier to protect yourself if someone claims they recieved something from you they didn’t want.

There are dozens and dozens more mailing list hosts available online. You can get a huge list of them at dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Computers/Communications_and_Networking/Software/Email/Mailing_Lists/.

Publishing guidelines for mailing lists

While setting up mailing lists is very simple, sharing the fruits of your research consistently over long periods of time is not so simple. When you’re considering publishing a newsletter or announcement list for your newsletter, keep these guidelines in mind:

• Pick a regular schedule of publishing and stick with it. A daily newsletter is probably too much (unless they’re very short), while once every two months is probably too little. Try for either once a week, once every two weeks, or once a month.

• If you stick to text-only newsletters, you might stand a better chance of getting your newsletter delivered. Sometimes HTML newsletters are blocked because they’re considered to be spam.

• While Google Groups and Yahoo Groups make it fairly easy to find the archives of a publicly accessible list, that isn’t always true of paid services. If you’re using a paid service to host your newsletter, make sure it offers archives of a mailing list (most of them do) and that you offer some kind of Web-based pointer to the archive—even if it’s just a single-page site you post on your institution’s intranet.

Other methods that work well for publishing your research are Web-based. This is what most people think of when they consider publishing their information on the Internet. However, the methods I propose may not have been the ones you were thinking of.

Hosted Blogging Solutions

Blogs are mentioned throughout this book. Short for Weblogs, they’re very popular ways for everyone from grade school kids to corporations to share their opinions, insights, and news. You can set up a blog on your own server, or you can get a hosted blogging solution. We’ll look at both of them here, starting with hosted blogging solutions. With hosted blogging, the blog software is contained and maintained on a third party’s server. You can either have the blog itself at your own domain, or you can have the blog hosted on the third party’s Web site.

How is a blog different from a Web site? For the most part, blogs are Web sites, but they’re easier to maintain. You don’t have to hand-code most blog sites; there are templates available for the standard parts of your site—parts like navigation and headers and footers. That leaves you free to concentrate on generating content—and free to change your entire site just by changing the template. If you’re allergic to HTML or you’re nervous about moving around and hand-coding a bunch of files, blogging could be for you (especially hosted blogging).

How is blogging different from other information structures, such as a wiki, that you maintain? A blog is ideal when you want to regularly publish news, information, and links, with optional commentary. A wiki is more for a set of information structures that you want to fill up.

For example, you might want to publish information on treatments for breast cancer. You could publish a blog that would have running pointers to news stories on breast cancer, press releases about new treatments, and commentary on personal experience or research processes. On the other hand, you could also publish a wiki, which might have pages for treatment, drugs, clinical trials, and so on. The pages on the wiki would be filled in as the publisher found information in various categories. The information wouldn’t be date-based, and there wouldn’t be much room for commentary.

Pros

• With hosted blogging, you may not have to set up your own site; the hosting site usually takes care of that for you. In the same vein, you don’t have to worry about server fees.

• Posting a blog is very simple; in some cases you can also even post via e-mail.

• When your blog is part of a hosted blog site, your site will often be automatically indexed by the hosting site’s search engine.

• You don’t have to worry about keeping the blogging software updated and maintained.

• You don’t have to worry about your software’s installation getting messed up by accident.

Cons

• Sometimes visitors will take you a little less seriously if you don’t have your own site, so if you do use hosted blogging, consider having the blog published on your own site.

• If something happens to the host site, it might happen to your blog, too.

• Customization of your blog will probably be more limited than it would be if you had your own site.

• If your site gets overwhelmingly popular and it’s located on the blog host’s site, the blog host might want to impose visitation restrictions on it.

Essentials

There are many places where you can post a free blog. Really large sites that are not more journal oriented include BlogSpot and TypePad. BlogSpot is a service of Blogger, while TypePad is a service of Movable Type. We cover those here.

BlogSpot

BlogSpot (blogger.com) is a service of Blogger, which is brought to you by the folks at Google. Blogger actually allows you to create blogs for your own site or to host them on Blogger’s servers. We’ll look at hosting items on Blogger’s servers here, and at hosting them on your own server in the next section.

The first thing you’ll need to do is sign up for a Blogger account, which is free. Once the account is set up, you can start making blogs. Yes, multiple blogs—you can set up more than one. I don’t recommend doing this, though, unless you’re publishing information on topics which are very different—heart surgery and ratites, for example. It’s easier to keep up with posting and maintaining one blog.

Once you’ve registered and signed in, look for the Create Your Blog link. Clicking it produces a multi-step walkthrough that includes naming your blog and choosing a template. When you’re finished, you’re taken to the composition area where you can write your entries (Figure 14.3).

Figure 14.3. Blogger has a composition area that lets you preview posts and insert HTML.

Blogger has a lot of little tricks to it; for hints and updates to features, check out Blogger Buzz, the official Blogger blog, at buzz.blogger.com/. In the meantime, here a few hints you might find useful.

• Play with the templates. There are lots of Blogger templates to choose from. Experiment until you get the one you want, and the one you think your audience will want. Some of the templates are very stylish, but maybe you want something easy to read or easy to scan for information.

• Consider comment moderation. Blogger offers a variety of ways to make sure that the comments on your blog do not get overrun with comment spam (people or robots coming in and posting fake comments which are actually just attempts to get links back to a Web site). Be sure that if you have comments on your blog (although you don’t have to provide this option), you turn on comment moderation.

• Post regularly. You don’t have to post every day or every hour like some people seem to. But do post regularly; otherwise, folks might forget to come visit. (Sure they could use your RSS feed, but not everyone wants to do that.) Think of the people who might discover your Web site via a search engine, only to find that you haven’t posted in a couple of weeks or longer. Do you think they’ll bother to get your RSS feed?

• Publicize your RSS feed. Blogger has Atom feeds available, but they work in RSS feed readers. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any of the templates show the feed by default! The feed is always the same file name; it’s atom.xml. So if you have a BlogSpot blog at example.blogspot.com, the URL of your feed would be example.blogspot.com/atom.xml. Make sure you link to that URL on your site’s home page, so that all your readers know where to get your RSS feed.

BlogSpot is a great place for people who aren’t very Web-oriented and who just want to quickly put up a Web site for their research. For people who want to get under the hood and do a little tweaking, a TypePad blog might be a better choice.

TypePad

TypePad (typepad.com) is brought to you by the people who do Movable Type. It is a hosted solution. There are three levels of hosting here: $4.95 a month for Basic, $8.95 a month for Plus (which allows you to have up to three blogs and customize your design), and $14.95 a month for Pro, which allows you to have multiple authors (for collaborative blogs), as well as full HTML editing and an unlimited number of blogs. There is also a free 30-day trial available.

You have to create an account and provide the name of your blog, as well as the preferred URL for the blog (you can have a URL at blogs.com or typepad.com). Once you’ve signed up, you’ve got a lot of choices to make! You’ll have to choose your blog’s layout, a design style, and most importantly how private your blog is. You can make it freely available, freely available but not publicized to the general public, or completely private and accessible only through a user name and password, If you’re looking for a way to publish a blog for a limited group of people, the latter option is a good way to do it. If you do choose this option, you must immediately specify a user name and password.

When you’re finished, a control panel opens, where you make your posts, edit the way your blog looks, and make lists (Figure 14.4). Lists? Yes, you can specify lists of things like people and music and have them show up in your blog. You can also set up photo albums.

Figure 14.4. TypePad is a little more complicated, but also more flexible.

Everything for TypePad is made available through the control panel that lets you do a variety of managerial tasks, including banning IPs from making comments, seeing how many page views your blog has gotten, and uploading files—you have 500 MB of file space for your TypePad account. While TypePad is not as simple as Blogger, it offers far more in the way of easy tweaking and customization.

For those of you with limited Web-building experience, hosted blogs are a great choice. They don’t require server maintenance or hosting, and they’re very easy to interact with. However, those of you who want to try different software, or want to do more tweaking than is offered by a hosted service might want to host a blog on your own site.

Your Own Blogging Site

The difference between blogging on a hosted service and blogging on your own site is that if you do it on your own site, you host both the software and the blog. You may have to get up to your elbows in technical stuff, but it also means more freedom.

Pros

• Blogs and sites on their own domains tend to be taken more seriously.

• You may not like your “neighbors” on the free blog sites; on your own domain you don’t have to have any.

• You can install all the plug-ins and add-ons that your ISP will permit.

• You will have many more software options than the free and hosted services offer.

Cons

• Hosting your blog on your own site is much more technical.

• Sometimes the hosting and the domain name registration costs more than a hosted service.

• If you’re not careful, you can get hacked. (Well, you can get hacked on a blog hosting service, too, but at least then you have someone to yell at.)

• Generating content and maintaining a site can be much more time consuming than just generating content on a free hosting service.

Essentials

There are two ways to have a blog on your own site: you can use a hosted service that publishes the blog to your site, or you can install the software on the server yourself.

In a way, the former option is the best of both worlds. The technical work is at a minimum, while you still have the freedom of your own domain. We’ll look at both options here.

Using a hosted service to publish your blog on your site

In addition to hosting a blog on its own server, Blogger also allows you to publish a blog to your own site. To publish a hosted blog to your own site, however, you’ll need to know how to transfer files to your site via FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Your Web host’s support section should have more information about that.

To use Blogger to publish a blog to your site, you’ll still need to have an account. Actually the setup works very much like hosting a blog with BlogSpot, except you’ll need to choose the Publishing tab in Settings (Figure 14.5).

Figure 14.5. If you want to publish to your own site in Blogger, you’ll have to set it up here.

There you’ll need to specify your FTP server, the path where blog files should be kept, and your blog’s filename and URL. After that, setting up the blog proceeds as it did for blogs hosted on Blogger.

Installing software to host your own blog

In addition to using hosting services, there are several packages that you can install on your own servers. Some of these packages are free, while some of them cost money. The ones I’m covering here are fairly low-cost. There are content management and blogging packages that could run into the thousands of dollars, but those’ll be overkill for information trappers who are just trying to share their knowledge. Let’s see what’s available on a smaller scale.

This space is still developing, but we’ll look at two popular packages—Movable Type and WordPress—and I’ll give you pointers to some other packages you can investigate.

Movable Type

Movable Type (sixapart.com/movabletype) is a complex application, and sometimes it can be frustrating, but its flexibility is amazing. In addition, Movable Type is supported by a large community of people who are constantly developing plug-ins and add-ons for it.

Pricing. Movable Type has several layers of pricing, ranging from a personal version with no support for free, all the way up to an enterprise-level version that you have to contact Movable Type to get pricing for. There are discounts offered for not-for-profit and educational groups.

Installing. To install Movable Type, you have to go through a several-step process that includes downloading a compressed set of files, uncompressing and uploading them to your site, setting file permissions (so that the core programs that make up Movable Type will run), and then tweaking configuration files so that the program looks for data in all the right places. After that, you must log in to Movable Type, set up your first blog, and set your preferences. It’s not rocket science, but it is time consuming.

Movable Type offers a tool you can download and run on your server to make sure that your server has all the Perl modules and other bits necessary to run Movable Type. If your Web site passes the test, be sure to follow the instructions step by step so that you don’t later trip over some step you missed. If you’re nervous about installing the software yourself, Movable Type can, for a small fee, install the software for you.

Features. Movable Type offers a lot of functionality right out of the gate. Some of the things you might want to pay attention to are the fact that some of the versions of Movable Type allow you to publish unlimited blogs on your server (again, only recommended if you’re publishing information on very different topics), can accept comments (where people make comments directly on your site) and trackbacks (where people link to your page and where their links are noted on your page). Movable Type also gives you a lot of control over the way your templates look, as well as the ability to archive your information several different ways—daily, weekly, or monthly, and by category. (You can set up your own templates as well.) Posting an entry is very much like posting in TypePad (Figure 14.6).

Figure 14.6. Movable Type offers several levels of detail to post entries.

In addition to its native functionality, Movable Type also offers huge numbers of plug-ins that are designed to add extra functionality to the software. Some of these are very easy to install, while others are pretty complex. You can get a full directory of available plug-ins at sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/.

WordPress

WordPress (wordpress.org) is the blog software on which I currently run ResearchBuzz and other sites. I have fallen in love with it over time. Some of its features are a little hard to grasp at first, and you’ll probably have to do a lot of experimenting before you understand the available Web site templates and WordPress’s formatting language. Once you have that all in hand, though, you’ll be amazed at what you can do.

Pricing. WordPress is an open source project and it’s free, though it does accept donations.

Installing. Because WordPress is free, it’s free for hosting companies to install on their Web sites. For that reason, you may find that your hosting service has the option to do a “one-click install” of WordPress. If it does, take advantage of it! It’ll save you a whole lot of trouble. If it doesn’t, you can download an installation document that’ll take you through several steps. One of the steps involves creating a database within which WordPress holds its information. It’s not quite a ten-minute install, but it’s pretty quick.

Features. WordPress offers a “dashboard” of tools across the top of the page. Notice that in addition to providing a place to post your blog information and create an entry (Figure 14.7), you also have a place to post “pages”—information relevant to your site but separate from your blog.

Figure 14.7. Most of WordPress’s post detail is in collapsible boxes to the right of the post area. You can take advantage of it—or not.

Examples of pages you might put here are information about you/your institution/your company, an overview of your project, and feedback forms. There’s also a place where you can make link lists (links in several different categories), create users, and manage comments. Everything is fairly straightforward except the WordPress “Themes”—those templates that determine what the pages look like. The default theme isn’t bad and there are many WordPress themes to choose from for the completely non-artistic among us (that means me!)

And like Movable Type, WordPress also offers plug-ins to extend the capabilities of the software. You can get an overview of the types of plug-ins available at wp-plugins.net/, or try the list at wiki.wordpress.org/Plugin.

Other blog software packages

While Movable Type and WordPress seem to be the two blogging software packages that get a lot of press, there are many others available. Here are three more that you might want to look at.

pMachine

If you want to install your software on a corporate site, you may want to try pMachine’s ExpressionEngine (pmachine.com). It’s one of the more expensive packages. A commercial license is $249.95; a non-commercial license is $99.95. However, if you’re planning to use ExpressionEngine on a personal site, you can download its slightly limited core package for free. It offers a variety of features that make it appropriate for a group of people or people in a company setting, including a private messaging system and support for a discussion board (sold separately). This is a very extensive and complicated package, but on the other hand, it goes way beyond the basic idea of blogging.

NucleusCMS

Moving from a more expensive package to another free one, we’ve got NucleusCMS (nucleuscms.org). This software is more limited than pMachine’s, but offers a variety of blogging features, including some nifty features like the ability to save entries as drafts, the ability to write entries and post them in the future (handy if you want to take a holiday but you want your blog to keep updating), and a variety of available plug-ins.

Textpattern

Like NucleusCMS, Textpattern (textpattern.com) is free. It offers a markup language called Textile that is purported to be easier to use than HTML and more reliable than WYSIWIG (What You See is What You Get) sites. Textpattern offers the features that you’d expect in blogging software, including some unique twists like the ability to password-protect site sections or specific pages, the ability to close pages after a specific period of time, and more direct editing of CSS files.

There’s no doubt about it—blogs are really hot right now. And if you’re publishing information that’s best organized by date, blogs are a good choice. But if you’re looking for a way to set up an outline of information that gets filled in over time, you might want to try a wiki instead. And though you don’t hear nearly as much about them as you do about blogs, there are plenty of options out there for wikis as well. For simplicity’s sake, you might want to try one of the available hosted wiki options.

Wiki

As I’ve mentioned earlier in this chapter, wikis are best understood as containers for information—outlines that you can fill in with information as you find it. Blogs, on the other hand, are more vehicles for date-based entries and commentary. And while some blogs allow you to break your entries down by category, those category/entry listings are not usually that easy to read.

Pros

• Easy to expand.

• Handy for large groups who need to put information together.

• Can be set up so that it can be edited by anybody or just by a certain group.

• People who visit it do not have to go through a bunch of archives to zero in on just the information they need.

• It only takes typing a word in a certain way to make a WikiWord, giving it its own page in your wiki.

• Information on topics is concentrated on singular pages, which might make it easier to be found via search engines.

Cons

• Fairly new; it can take a little getting used to.

• Openness of content editing can be a disaster unless carefully managed.

• Not as easy to incorporate commentary; more for factual data. (Because many people edit the same pages, if you incorporate commentary, you might end up with a page full of flame wars.)

• It’s difficult to summarize in a newsletter, compared to summarizing something more date-oriented, like a blog.

Essentials

The best example of what a wiki is all about is probably Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). This wiki is an attempt to build an encyclopedia that’s fully open and fully editable. That sounds like a recipe for disaster, but somehow it’s not. Let’s look at a typical page (Figure 14.8).

Figure 14.8. A typical Wikipedia page.

Notice there are tabs across the top of the page that include Edit This Page, which anyone can click and then edit the page they’re looking at. There’s also a history page that shows the edits that have occurred in the past. Edits can be as simple as correcting a spelling error to as complex as fleshing out an entire article.

Does this seem a bit overwhelming to you? A wiki that’s also an encyclopedia? Okay, let’s look at some smaller-scale stuff. To get an idea of how other groups are using wikis, try the list at usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SiteList or WikiIndex (wikiindex.com/Main_Page), an effort to list all available wikis.

Earlier in the book, we looked at a few options that you have for portable wikis and giant enterprise wikis. There are wikis that you can install on your own server, but they’re somewhat technical. If you’re interested in setting up a wiki on your own server, you can get a list of wiki software packages at dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Groupware/Wiki/Wiki_Engines/. Most of them are free. For the sake of simplicity in this book, we’re going to look at hosted wiki services.

Hosted wiki services

At the moment, there doesn’t appear to be any premiere wiki hosting services, so here’s a roundup for you to choose from, all of which have different highlights and strengths. Most of these are free; the ones that aren’t have only a nominal cost.

JotSpot

JotSpot (jotspot.com) offers a lot of extras. For the most part, it’s a paid service, but there’s a free service available, too. Getting started is a simple five-part process: enter your e-mail address, your password, and the subdomain that you want to appear on the jot.com domain where your wiki will be set up (it’ll look like this: example.jot.com). You then need to provide your name and enter a word string that shows on the page to prevent robots from setting up wikis. Once you’ve done all that, JotSpot will present you with your new wiki (Figure 14.9).

Figure 14.9. JotSpot offers a quick wiki setup.

JotSpot has instructional videos, FAQs, and a knowledge base for learning more about how to use the JotSpot service. And this will come in handy; JotSpot has a lot of additional functionality, including a variety of applications you can add to your wiki, like a calendar, RSS feed reader, company directory, and blog.

PBwiki

PBwiki (pbwiki.com) has a simple one-step process for making a wiki. You enter the name of your wiki, and provide an e-mail address. Once that’s done a URL is e-mailed to you. Click on that URL and boom, you have a wiki. You’ll be asked to create a password and specify whether you want your wiki to be public or not.

PBwiki is not as slick and extensive as JotSpot, but it’s not as expensive or intimidating either. Once you’ve logged in, you’re shown the front page of your site along with some pointers to documentation. The PBwiki folks encourage you to play with the features and experiment with some of the offerings like RSS feeds and the ability to publish a sidebar on a blog. There’s also a very lively forum available.

PBwiki is free, but a premium version is available for $9.95 a month with higher levels of service going up to $34.95 a month for corporate level blogs. The additional costs pay for more file space, more available designs, and more features.

SeedWiki

Like PBwiki, SeedWiki (seedwiki.com) offers accounts that are primarily free, and like PBwiki it’s very easy to sign up. Accounts require a name, e-mail address, and password.

Once you’ve registered, you’re given the option to set up a wiki or a blog—unlike the other services they’re not set up for you. Setting up a new wiki means specifying a name for it, a language, a description, and a folder—in other words, the subject under which the wiki should be listed.

Once you’ve made your wiki, a vanilla page with a navigation bar on the side displays to help you administrate it. I like the way that SeedWiki is doing its wiki because it provides a lot of freedom to experiment. You can make a wiki, and if you don’t like it or want to mess around, you can just delete it and start over—no muss, no fuss.

Wikispaces

Less standalone than a regular wiki is Wikispaces (wikispaces.com), which offers easy integration with blog tools like Blogger. Once you’ve registered (registration requires a user name, e-mail address, and password), you have the option of creating a “space.” Spaces can be public (anybody can view and edit), protected (anybody can view, but only certain people can edit), and private (nobody can view or edit). Public and protected options are free, but the private option costs $5 a month.

Once you’ve created your space, you’ll see that it looks a lot like a wiki, only the editing options seem a little friendlier than most. For more information on integrating Wikispace into your TypePad or Blogger blog, go into the options menu and check out the Integrate a Blog option.

Wikis and blogs are two types of Web sites, and are offered as packaging and hosting services. But while they’re two types of Web sites, they aren’t the only kinds of Web sites. You can also make your own site.

Making Your Own Site

When it comes down to it, an HTML page is just a text file that has certain formatting elements in it. It’s not a programming language. It doesn’t require compiling. As long as you have some Web space and a way to upload your HTML files, you can create your own Web site to hold your found information.

Pros

• You can do absolutely anything you want to with it.

• You can integrate multimedia content.

• You can experiment and try out different ways to encapsulate information.

Cons

• You have to code your own Web pages, which, while not difficult, does require a certain amount of technical knowledge.

• You’ll spend a lot of time maintaining the containers for your content (the pages) as well as the content itself.

• You may have to hire a designer to make your pages visually interesting.

• You’ll miss out on a lot of plug-ins and other ways that blog software and wikis add functionality.

Essentials

A tutorial on HTML is totally outside the scope of this book, and frankly I wouldn’t recommend creating your own site unless you have an information structure in mind that just doesn’t work within the confines of a hosted blog site or wiki, unless you already have extensive HTML skills and some experience as a site builder.

Basic HTML skills

Basic HTML skills can be acquired through any number of books. But there are online tutorials available as well. Check out the HTML Goodies page (htmlgoodies.com/primers/html/), which has a seven-part HTML primer that’s designed to take one week to complete. HTML Code Tutorial (htmlcodetutorial.com/) has a whole domain dedicated to teaching the ins and outs of HTML. And if you want something really exhaustive, which when gathered into a PDF document weighs in at over 300 pages, check out mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/lessons.html.

Planning a Web site

If you have an idea for a very small Web site, it might not even occur to you that you have to plan out a Web site. But take it from me, even the most modestly considered Web sites have a tendency to grow like Topsy. Making The Net Work has an overview article that gives several salient points about which you should think when planning a Web site: makingthenetwork.org/toolbox/tools/webguide.htm. An article at Sitepoint breaks down what you’ll need to do, step by step, as you plan your Web site: sitepoint.com/article/site-planner.

Now if you look at these articles, especially if you’re an individual or in a small group, you’re going to feel like they’re serious overkill. And they probably are! But at least glance over them. If you’re building a Web site for an institution or a corporation, please look over the site planning articles carefully. If you’re building the site yourself, it’ll give you some useful guidelines. If you’re not, it’ll help you understand the goals and concerns of the people who are building the site.

In this section, we’ve looked at learning HTML, but of course that’s not the only way to run your own Web site. You also have the option of learning a software package that’ll help you put a Web site together. For example, you could learn Dreamweaver, or Microsoft’s FrontPage. So you can either learn HTML or a software package—but the same “cons” of extra coding time, maintenance, and lack of universal plug-ins will apply.

Thus far in the chapter it’s been all about content—how do you make the content, where do you keep the content? That’s the place to start. But the next step is how do you distribute your content? So let’s spend a little more time on RSS feeds.

RSS Feeds for Content Distribution

RSS feeds, as you learned earlier in this book, are XML documents that alert users of changes to Web sites and summaries of new content. They can get a lot more complicated than that—they can hold everything from graphics to MP3 files—but at the heart of it, RSS feeds are about providing information updates.

Making that kind of information available is critical to you, the information publisher; the more ways your Web site can be kept up with, the more likely your visitors will make the effort to keep up with it, and the more readers you’ll have. So you might have a blog and a newsletter, or a wiki and a discussion group, or a quarterly published PDF and a wiki. In addition to all that, you should have, whenever it’s available, an RSS feed.

Built-in solutions

When is it available? For blogs, all the time; all major blog software and services automatically create RSS feeds for you. For wikis, some of the time. When evaluating a wiki, look for syndication options. And be careful because many RSS feeds for wikis require having the user name and password within the RSS feed’s URL; this is not the best idea for security reasons and should be used very carefully, and not with an information-sensitive wiki. And for mailing lists and providers, it depends on the provider you’re using; Google Groups and Yahoo Groups have no problem with providing RSS feeds, while it’s less available in the paid services.

If you’ve got an RSS feed built into the solution you’re using, you’ve got one big thing to decide and one big thing to do. If you don’t have an RSS feed, I’ll give you a quick tutorial on creating one.

Choosing between full or abbreviated

RSS feeds are marked by the “full or abbreviated?” controversy. A “full” RSS feed means that it reproduces in its entirety the contents of a Web site. A blog, for example, that posted all of its entries in an RSS feed would have a full RSS feed. An abbreviated RSS feed is a feed that only contains an overview of the changes to the site—story summaries or, more often, the first 20 (or 30 or 50) words of a story. ResearchBuzz is an example of a site whose feed contains only snippets of stories that have been posted to the Web site, while Gary Price’s ResourceShelf has a full feed.

Feelings run high about this. Some people think that full RSS feeds are absolutely the way to go and it’s not fair to RSS feed users to use anything else. Other people are more concerned about what making full RSS feeds available would do to the distribution of their content. As you’ll see in a moment, it’s very easy to repurpose the content of an RSS feed and make it available on other Web sites. In other words, if you made the content of your Web site fully available via your RSS feed, it’s possible (even likely, depending on your content) that someone would use your RSS feed to put your content on their site! Why? To have fresh content. To generate pages on which to put advertising. There are lots of reasons.

Now maybe your research is nonprofit or just a hobby and you don’t care if your content gets repurposed to other sites. Or maybe you’d welcome the reuse of it as long as it got the word out there about your research. That’s fine; publishing a full-content RSS feed would be the right step for you. (It does have its value for your readers, including the ability to keep up with your site without visiting it directly and passing on the full content of useful site additions to friends and interested parties.) However, if you’re concerned about your content being used on other sites, or you’re trying to make some revenue from visitors coming to your site (and therefore need eyeballs looking at your site’s advertising), then I recommend using abbreviated RSS feeds.

Of course, how you have the RSS feed doesn’t matter unless your visitors know about it, which brings us to the next step.

Promoting your RSS feeds

Make sure that visitors know about your RSS feeds! This is especially important for hosted services like Blogger. In my experience, the basic templates don’t do a lot to highlight the fact that an RSS feed is available. So make sure that the home page has a link to your RSS feed, and make sure as well that you submit your RSS feed to at least a couple of RSS feed directories like the ones we’ve looked at in the book. Feedster (feedster.com) is an absolute must, as is Technorati (technorati.com).

Most hosted services have RSS feeds built in. Google Groups and Yahoo Groups offer RSS feeds. Most blog packages have RSS feeds built in. But you may be in a situation where you have to make your own feeds by hand. Okay. It’s not fun, but, okay. Here’s a basic lesson on making RSS feeds.

Creating your own RSS feeds

If you have to make your own RSS feeds, try to limit them to basic text information; multimedia RSS feeds can be a bit complicated. Use this three-step process to make your own RSS feeds.

Start with a template

Just like HTML files, RSS feed files have headers and footers that never change. They help tell the computer that’s reading the file what it is and how it should look. You’ll need to change a little bit of information on them but not much. Script 14.1 shows a typical header for a basic RSS file.

Script 14.1. The header.

As you can see, there are some elements that you need to address:

• Title. The name of your Web site, naturally!

• Link. The URL for your Web site. (Note this is the URL for your Web site, not your RSS feed.)

• Description. A brief description of your Web site.

• Language. The primary language in which your content is generated. The above example shows American English. You can get a list of the language codes you can use in your feed at msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/language_codes.asp.

• PubDate. The date your feed was published.

• Copyright. Whatever copyright disclaimer you want to make about your content.

• LastBuildDate. The date your content was last revised.

At the end of your RSS feed you’ll need your footer (Script 14.2), which is very simple. That you can leave as it is.

Script 14.2. The footer.

Fill in the blanks

The actual content summaries from your Web site are contained in items, which look like Script 14.3.

Script 14.3. The items.

You’ll have to customize an item for each of your RSS feeds:

• Title. Title of your item.

• Link. A direct link to the item. This can be a file or an anchor within a file.

• Description. This is a little misleading. Yes, this can be a description of your item, but it can also be the item itself, spread out over several paragraphs. If you want to include all your content in your RSS feed, put your unabbreviated content here.

• PubDate. The date the item was published.

Lather, rinse, repeat

For each bit you want to include off your Web site, you’ll need to generate an item. So in a plain text file you’d put the feed’s header, an item for each story you’re going to include in the RSS feed, and then the footer. You can theoretically include as many items as you like, but I’d limit it to 15 or 20.

I actually did this once a week (for a couple of years!) for a Web site that doesn’t generate an RSS feed. Here’s how I did it: I had an RSS feed template. Every week I changed all the dates via my text editor’s search-and-replace function. Then I edited each of the items to reflect new content. Since I changed the RSS feed weekly, it was easy to keep up with.

Once you’ve generated your RSS feed, upload it to your site. And then check to make sure that it works.

Testing your RSS feed

To test your RSS feed, use Feed Validator at feedvalidator.org. Enter the URL where you uploaded the feed and Feed Validator will tell you if it’s okay or not. If it’s not, Feed Validator will tell you why. I do this every week, too; here are some common problems I run into.

• Unencoded characters. Some characters have to be properly encoded before you can include them in an RSS feed. The one that trips me up is the ampersand (&). The proper way to encode it is by using &. (Most of the time I remember to search and replace the ampersand with & before uploading my feed.)

• Smart quotes. Sometimes I’ll copy and paste something from a non-text source (such as a quote). Sometimes those quotes will include “smart quotes” instead of the ASCII plain quotes.

You can get a full list of what Feed Validator flags, as well as pointers to how to fix the problems, at feedvalidator.org/docs/.

Making RSS feeds publishable to Web sites

RSS feeds in and of themselves are just text files. Many of your users will want to read them with RSS feed readers, which is okay, but some of your readers may want to include your feed on their Web site. Or perhaps you have many RSS feeds and you want to include feeds from one site on another of your sites. There are several ways to do this, from installing programs on your server to simpler solutions. Let’s stick with simpler. FeedDigest can take a feed and give you code to put your feed on a Web site.

FeedDigest

FeedDigest (feeddigest.com/) allows you to not only make a feed publishable but to format it and change its look and content. You start by just specifying the URL for your feed. From there, you’ll be given several options, including how many items to show and how to sort them. Then you’ll be prompted to choose the template for the digest from about ten options.

Once you’ve generated the feed and registered, you’ll have the option to get PHP or JavaScript code to include the digest on your site, or to give to others to include the digest on their site.

FeedDigest will also show you how to edit your site to make your RSS feed easier to discover by browsers and robots visiting your site. You’ll also learn about “pinging sites”—making sites that index RSS feeds aware of new content on your RSS feed, so they know when to index it.

Working Toward Manageability

Once you get into the full swing of trapping and publishing information, you’ll find that you’re culling a lot of interesting information and you’re passing it along in various formats. You may even find that this process of finding, organizing, and passing along the information is taking more and more of your time! In a bonus chapter, which you can access by registering your copy of this book at peachpit.com/title/0321491718, I offer some solutions for making information trapping a routine, rather than a giant monster that takes over your life. I also provide tips for how to keep your keywords and search sources fresh and current.

Thanks for reading!