RSS in Plain English

I am in the midst of a relaunch of JEMM.com, a small business back in my home state of Iowa. We are taking it into new directions, many of which they have never witnessed or knew about before I got my hands on the site. I’ve also been muttering the words “Drupal” and “RSS” quite a bit, not to mention “search engine optimization” and “content management system”.

The Drupal part is something they are grasping well, and it is so nice to have a CMS in which nearly everyone at the business can have a helping hand in building the site with. The learning curve is getting easier everyday, and I’m discovering what it’s like to teach Drupal to new eyes, especially those who are still on the outside of what Web 2.0 really is.

The RSS part is another story. When I pointed this video out to them, they came back to me with a much better understanding of what I was trying to teach them. Plus, it’s hard to convey my daily interactivity with this stuff on a regular basis.

Still wondering what RSS is? Watch this video by the folks at CommonCraft.

Talking to Boris about my adventures, I’ll try to convey more about the creation of JEMM.com on a Drupal platform. If anyone wanted to help me out with some design input, I’m all ears. At this time, we’re much more focused on content.

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2 Replies to “RSS in Plain English”

  1. A clean, basic start. It’s pretty close to what I need to build one of these days real soon now: a turn key small business brochure style site, upgraded with “Web 2.0” and CMS features.

    Some tips:
    * it looks like a lot of pages and sub pages are hand built: check out CCK and Views, does the same stuff that Susie Gardner talked about at Northern Voice with Expression Engine — custom content with no coding
    * specific example: imagine the FAQ with each entry as a separate “FAQ post”
    * a newsletter *might* be a good fit for the audience: simplenews allows you to write newsletters…but each newsletter also has its own RSS feed

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