At 05:12 PM 7/11/2006 +0100, Mark Stanton wrote:
There's sort of a link.
We run a (paper only) magazine and have done for nearly six years.
It currently has a subscription list of between three and four
hundred, which I would like to extend significantly. Our current
subscription model is to subscribe for six issues (which lasts a
year). What I want to do is start distributing it electronically as
well.
...
Bear with me. This may be way too far 'out of the box' to be useful to you,
but the following approach might have merit.
First, being able to do this depends on how 'friendly' your customers are.
You'll see what I mean in a moment.
The system would consist of these main 'components':
1) a server (duh - to store the files, host West-Wind WebConnection, etc).
2) West-Wind Web Connection - to provide services to the next component
3) a rich/smart client application (VFP of course) to communicate with the
WWWC service on your server
In order to get to the electronic version of your magazine, the user would
have to download and install the Client app. Just imagine having the full
capabilities of a VFP available on the client and server side.
Some upsides:
- your magazine content is much better protected than on standard web pages
- no simple web 'page' to find and hack. WWWC processes the requests for
data and your code in WWWC can decide if it's an OK request (e.g. you could
even limit users to a specific number of times they download the same
magazine, etc)
- your client-side app can be set up to be unique per user. E.g. first-time
start up they 'register' the software - the resulting 'code' (which the
user never sees) is tucked away with the application. You can log and
monitor such registration as well as use the code in data download requests.
- You have a LOT of control over how you can distribute, request, store
results, etc. Both the client side and WWWC side has all the rich feature
set of VFP to draw on. E.g. you don't have to look at this as 'only'
transferring files. You could make it as simple as that, but if you want
more protection/control, you could add it in.
- You can build custom logic to encrypt/compress the files which can only
be understood by the corresponding VFP rich/smart client application
- Although I wouldn't recommend it, you could create an 'expiration' date
when the file would be deleted in the client application (of course, savvy
users may find ways to copy/move things around anyway, etc).
- Build in automatic subscription renewal notices. Maybe even turn off
software if subscription expires (I wouldn't recommend that though).
Some downsides:
- software installation: some folks may not like that (thus how 'friendly'
are they).
- this will be a bit of work - especially if you've never used WWWC before
(but you could get some help pretty easy and quick for WWWC)
- would this balloon other requirements? Would you now start worrying about
what the user does with the file data once they have it? Would you want to
put a lot more restrictions in the Client application to address this?
(realizing, of course, that the generic 'file distro' approach gives you
basically no protection).
- keeping the client software up to date (software always has changes on
the horizon)
To address the downsides, I'll mention a couple things:
1) you don't have to stop at making this a simple download system. Make it
a full-blown 'document management' system for the user. In other words,
when they run the client app, they can see all the downloads they did
before, search for things, bring up the document with a click- and they can
do all that without being connected to the Internet. They pretty much just
need the Internet connection to get new magazines, program updates, etc.
2) Since you're giving them a client application, you can put all kinds of
other things in there - perhaps even a simple way to send letters to the
editor, etc. You could maybe even let them take their own local documents
and 'link' them to specific publications of your magazine (I don't know if
that makes sense in your magazine's content or not).
3) If your creation/publication process can handle it, you could create a
VFP table that has specific keywords for articles, the contents of each
magazine, etc - all for easier browsing/searching by the user (example:
take full, plain text of a magazine and put it in a memo field for
easier/faster text searching). Perhaps even stick in 'preview' info of
upcoming publications.
4) Keeping the system up to date is pretty easy. You could look in the
Profox archives for discussions about auto updating an application. Pretty
much you have a startup .exe which looks for updates and downloads them if
they exist. Most have described this in a LAN setting, but I do it via FTP
over the Internet (or it could be a WWWC request).
5) For those users that hate computers, I suppose they'd just stick with
the paper copy. For the computer-savvy users, I don't think they would mind
installing a software program in order to get the electronic data -
especially if you talk about all the other benefits they'll get from using it.
Just some ideas. The above is not a 'simple' solution. But, IMO, it's a
pretty powerful/flexible one.
-Charlie
_______________________________________________
Post Messages to: [email protected]
Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox
OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech
** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the
author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added
to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
