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Everyday Software: Nonprofit Online News Publishing
By Michael C. Gilbert, April 2005
This article was first published in the April issue of the Nonprofit Online News Journal.
For years now, I have wanted to describe the software and procedures that I use to produce Nonprofit Online News. But since it's only recently that nonprofits have displayed much interest in blogging (the core of our publishing model), I've only recently felt like this might be more than just another overly esoteric article from a "lovable curmudgeon and professional contrarian". (Thank you to Deborah Elizabeth Finn for that description.) So, today I will embark on telling you how this all works.
In order to keep this to a reasonable length, I am only going to describe the publishing process. For simplicity's sake, I have divided that process into two parts: content preparation and content distribution. I will tackle them in that order, describing the software and the workflow in each part.
Content Preparation
I will not touch on the elaborate procedures and baroque technologies that help us gather and process very large quantities of message based information and filter it into something useful. Although it's a pretty critical component of our information management success, I hope to explore the workflow at another time.
There are three primary forms of content published through Nonprofit Online News: original articles by myself or my colleagues, articles reprinted from other sources, and news items. Their provenance is illustrated in this diagram.
On the left, from the bottom up, we have one of the simpler workflows. Somewhere, an author has written a piece that we pointed to in a news item. If it meets our requirements for reprinting and we receive permission to do so, then we grab a copy of it. Often it will be in PDF format and although we will ultimately be publishing it in PDF again, in order to edit it and lay it out, we need to extract a plain text version, for which Trapeze is an excellent tool, especially for multi-page documents. This content then feeds into our monthly magazine publishing process, which we will describe in a moment.
On the far right of the diagram, an author (that is me) writes short annotations about online news and resources. These are queued up, written, spell checked, and uploaded in a great little desktop weblog editor called Marsedit. (I have evaluated an excellent competing tool called Ecto, but Marsedit is what has ended up in my workflow.) Although it's only used in this workflow to prepare microcontent for Nonprofit Online News, it supports publishing to multiple weblog servers through multiple APIs.
In the preparation workflow diagram, you will note the little application hovering to one side and feeding into Marsedit, called Markdown. Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax, a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. It allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to valid HTML. There are many great stand alone and embedded implementations of Markdown, and Marsedit is one of them.
For writing longer pieces, it helps to use a full fledged writing tool, which can be either a text editor or a word processor. My requirements are simple: strong support of open file formats, live word count, clean user interface, strong interoperability, and an open scripting interface.
Under some circumstances, I might need the ability to print attractive documents. This requirement is not important for web publishing, but sometimes I want a more unified writing environment, in order to use the same tool with which I might write reports or other printed documents. That's when I use a word processor.
Among word processors, I have used Abiword, Copywrite, Mariner Write, Microsoft Word, Mellel, and Nisus Writer Express. The one that I come back to most often in this context is Nisus Writer Express. Abiword is open source, which is appealing, but it's still too clunky. Copywrite is well suited for fiction or history and might warrant another treatment. Microsoft Word is a powerhouse, it's a great choice if you need indexes or table of contents for books. although there are some great tools for books out there as well. Word's major drawback is with file formats and character sets, which relate to my general fear about lock-in from Microsoft. (Though I have to admit that on the Mac side, they have improved.) Mellel and Mariner Write are just a little too simple for my needs, but might be perfect for many people. Nisus Writer Express is under very active development, plays very well with all my other tools, is extendible, and elegant.
Among text editors, there are even more to choose from. For someone who is not primarily a programmer, I have something of a remarkable obsession with text editors. Among dedicated text editors, I have spent meaningful amounts of time using Alpha, BBedit, Emacs, Jedit, Smultron, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Textwrangler, and Vi. All of these are superb. Emacs, Jedit, and Vi are powerful, cross-platform, open-source editors, with their own, ideosyncratic user interfaces. Among the others, I have settled on BBedit. BBedit's consistency with other applications, deep interoperability, and sheer power make it a very comfortable writing environment.
In the center of the diagram is the editorial process. Working counterclockwise from the lower right, I'll start with the editing of original articles. For this, we use a great little text editor I mentioned earlier, clumsily named SubEthaEdit. It's essentially a collaborative text editor in that it allows shared editing of a text document in real time over a network.
Next, the markup of individual articles is done through a browser interface to the Manila Content Management System. Manila is a cross platform application that is very easy to set up and very easy to start using. Just as importantly, it is vastly configurable and very interoperable. I'll say more about Manila in the next section.
Finally, layout for the monthly magazine, which includes categorised news archives, reprints, original articles, and other resources, is done in InDesign. There is more than enough out there written about InDesign, if you want to learn more. It's not the ideal XML-based, automated workflow that I would like, but it's a very powerful print publishing tool. From there the magazine is published in PDF format.
Content Distribution
I will not be covering the relationship management processes that are deeply intertwined with our publishing model. In addition to the basic things like subscription management and format selection, we have elaborate and automated permission building, click-through tracking and aggregation, preference setting, and personalization workflows that help us respect and deepen the relationships we have with our readers. We will explore those at another time.
Content distribution is somewhat easier to understand. There are two key software platforms responsible for delivering content in a variety of formats and frequencies, to a range of audiences, based upon their preferences. The flow of content to those audiences is captured in this diagram.
All content flows through our content management system first, before being distributed either by the web or by email. We use the Manila CMS, which is built on the open source Frontier application server. The development community around Frontier and Manila have been at the forefront of web application standards such as RSS and XML-RPC. Just the settings available through the web interface will keep a content manager busy for a long time.
Manila is responsible for serving articles and news pages as HTML. It also serves downloadable documents in PDF format, such as our monthly magazine. It renders news in the RSS standard format, which are subscribed to through news readers such as Bloglines and NetNewsWire. In this way we accomodate several different reading habits from the same base of content.
We go even further through the use of a sophisticated relationship management system that interoperates with Manila. We use a legacy system called RMS from our (now closed) company, Social Ecology, which is also built on the open source Frontier application server. Once a year, I evaluate competing products and so far they all come up short. In particular, RMS excells in the area of rapid development of new online communication workflows by nontechnical staff.
RMS is responsible for sending out email newsletter versions of our content, and notifications which drive visitors back to content on our web site. In particular, according to preferences set by subscribers, it sends out either a weekly digest or a daily digest of all the news from the site. The news is pulled in automatically from Manila through an open standard XML-RPC interface. It also sends out two types of notifications by email as well: excerpts of new articles with links back to the full versions, and introductions to the latest issue of the monthly magazine, with a link to the download.
Closing Thoughts
One of the things that I have been enjoying about the Everyday Software series, beyond the fact that it allows me to answer a great many questions that people have about how we do what we do, is that it's an opportunity for systematic reflection. It's a chance to do for my own organization the kind of communication centered mapping that I do for my clients.
While this is always illuminating, in this case it has two consequences for me. First, it makes me proud to realize what an amazing rich flow of communication we manage with very meager resources. This inspires me to extoll our clients, who are typically much larger than we are, to be more ambitious. Second, it helps me identify places for improvement. For example, I want to consider the use of the Markdown syntax in delivering an HTML version of our email newsletter.
But the most important thing I wanted to accomplish is to give you a better idea of the tools that we use every day to accomplish the work that we do. If you're in the business of publishing content, which you probably are, I can only hope that this has been illustrative.
If you found this article interesting or helpful,
please consider making a donation to Nonprofit Online News.
It will probably feel good!
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