>I'm interested in reading more about your vision.
OK, here goes...
I have currently laid plans to develop (and have begun developing) a
suite of REBOL applications I have dubbed "The News & Mail."
The first in the series is an application called "The Headlines" which
allows you to update the news headlines on a web site by simply sending
an e-mail to a POP account.
Why this functionality? For the sake of simplicity and accessibility.
If you can update the news headlines on a web site by simply sending an
e-mail, you can update the site from any number of e-mail clients,
including those found on Palm devices, etc., so long as they are
sending text/plain output (a more complicated parsing routine for RTF
and HTML could be developed, as well.)
The original, functioning version of "The Headlines" can be seen at
http://www.fargonews.com
where all of the headlines and article content appearing there has been
updated via e-mail. My original script is called Scoop and can be
downloaded at
http://www.bebits.com/bob/3796/Scoop_1.0.zip
I have completely re-written Scoop to be object-oriented, with
individual news articles saved as objects which are loaded and handled
later. All local settings are saved in a config file which is loaded
first. The new version of Scoop is called "The Headlines" and the input
portion is functional, while the text/html output needs to be broken
off and developed as a separate application. The look of the text/html
output is controlled by a cascading stylesheet which can be replaced by
any other stylesheet using the same class names.
Other ideas for "The News & Mail" suite...
-"The Links" for updating web site links via e-mail.
-"The Ads" for updating banner advertisements via e-mail.
-Commenting System, Classified Ad System (through CGI.)
-Offer access to "The Headlines," "The Links," and "The Ads" through a
CGI interface, as well.
Ulimately, I'm looking to offer a Web business customer the opportunity
to manage a news-oriented Web site without having to actually manage a
web space. The customer will be able to manage the site through e-mail
and Web-based forms. Setup time for the Web developer will be minimal:
perhaps 30 minutes tops to customize the config file which controls the
various REBOL applications in the suite.
OK, so I've spilled my guts. Input, anyone?
I'd like to know what people think about saving data as objects vs.
saving data in database format. I'm assuming saving the data as objects
makes the data more versatile.
Thanks.
-Ryan
