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World Wide Widgets
Members of NAA's New Media Federation discuss the pros and cons of the tools they use to maintain their Web sites
by L. Carol Christopher
So yesterday you were working on the sports desk, and today your editor wants you to launch a World Wide Web site from scratch. Or maybe you already have a site, but it's not quite big enough or "sticky" enough to snare an audience.
If your job involves building and maintaining your newspaper's presence on the Web, you compete with thousands of other developers for the attention of a small subset of Web surfers. To attract and retain these cybernauts, who can blast away from your home page with the click of a mouse, your site must compel interest. Unfortunately, because managers consider the Web site an "experiment," you also have no resources. There is a way out: You can automate your Web production by choosing and using the right tools. To help you get started, TechNews contacted several members of NAA's New Media Federation to ask them what they think of their tools--what they like and what they don't, what makes their life a joy and what gives them cyberfits. They ruminated on a range of categories: server hardware and software, text conversion and authoring, tools that make a site "come alive," Web advertising, databases and search engines, and even some tools of the future.
Server Hardware and Software
What's a Web site without a server? Sure, you could maintain a site on someone else's computer (InfiNet is a popular choice), but you don't have to be particularly bold, young or restless to put together your own server package, either.
Of the New Media Federation members we interviewed, Jay Small, online-services editor at Indianapolis Newspapers Inc., seems the most satisfied. He says his Apple server was easy to set up and run. Also, "Our site performance remains solid, though we now routinely log 150,000 server hits or more a day."
However, Bob Gale, new-media editor for The Herald of Everett, Wash., believes that Mac servers don't offer as much performance as Intel Pentium-based computers running Windows NT, which is why his site chose to implement the latter.
At the Orange County (Calif.) Register, Val Cohen sought the best of both worlds, running an AppleShare Server emulator on a powerful Silicon Graphics Inc. Challenge server. The platform's PC connectivity, though, leaves him somewhat dismayed.
Dan Hontz, online producer for The Arizona Republic and The Arizona Business Gazette, agrees that SGI's Challenge and Indy servers offer great performance, but has also encountered some reliability problems: "Within a year, we had disk and power-supply failures that either shut us down or slowed us down."
Dave Blizzard, the director of technology for Sun Media Corp. in Toronto, reports that his Sun Microsystems Sparc servers offer "really great dependability and lots of CPU," but "you must make modifications to the kernel for efficient TCP/IP traffic."
On the server software side, Netscape gets generally high marks. At Fayetteville (N.C.) Online, George Frink, online systems administrator, says, "We use the Netscape Communication Server for the Internet and CGI development. It is reliable, easy to use and easy to configure."
Other Netscape products also produce good results. Blizzard uses Commerce Server, Enterprise Server, and Publishing System; Cohen says the Commerce Server works great at his site, too.
It isn't necessary to go with industry giants to get good software that meets your particular needs; smaller players can also work out (once you've identified them). For example, Gale says his site picked O'Reilly's WebSite Pro despite reviews that rate its performance as slower than either Netscape's servers or Microsoft's Internet Information Server. He feels it provides excellent documentation and development tools for the money, and "since we're learning as we go, those seemed like more important considerations."
At the Chicago Tribune, Owen Youngman, director of interactive media, rates the overall reliability of InfiNet's OpenMarket as high, though he reports some customization problems. And Small's WebSTAR software is easy and efficient: "It'll manage multiple domain names and accepts plug-in utilities and CGIs."
Text Conversion, Authoring
Your franchise rests on the text produced by your newsroom. But to display it on the Web you'll need to convert it to hypertext markup language.
Cohen relies on Nisus Writer, BBedit and "lots of search-and-replace routines" on Atex, but seeks a more efficient way of converting files. He is considering Pantheon Builder.
Because Sysdeco's (now Atex's) DewarView runs only on Windows 3.1, Gale and friends experiment with work arounds--building a database-driven system using Allaire's ColdFusion and using home-grown Microsoft Word macros and Visual Basic programs to move content from the editorial system to a Microsoft Access database. Another strategy he's pursuing is to move editorial into a database that can feed both the paper and the Web site. "We found a nice product from Management Process Integrators called GuideLines that is designed to do that....MPI has been very helpful and has been enhancing the product based on our feedback."
Jack D. Lail, manager of online publishing for The Knoxville News-Sentinel, reports that his site is using Quark's BeyondPress "to break down some Quark pages into HTML, along with Lexis-Nexis' Connections32 to filter stories." Both products work well, he says, noting that Lexis-Nexis seems willing to listen to customer suggestions. Derek Nolen, Webmaster at the Albuquerque Journal, finds BeyondPress simple to set up and use. "It makes porting our daily news pages to the Internet very easy, but it still is not very reliable when it comes to exporting tables from Quark to our HTML editor."
Small says his Macintosh site relies on BBedit. "Most of our file conversions happen during exchanges with our ancient Atex J11 editorial front-end system. We're slowly migrating toward an automated system of file conversion and transfer from the J11 to a Butler SQL database running on a high-end Macintosh server."
BBedit's strong selling point: simplicity. Nolen says it "makes hand coding HTML a breeze. Its search-and-replace capabilities make changing multiple elements throughout the site pretty easy. Its scripting capability lets us automate part of our process." A good HTML authoring package is a near-must for online staff. Hontz gives high marks to Microsoft's FrontPage, which "makes coding nightmares like tables a breeze, and it's reliable. It's got features for serious HTML work--it's not just for rookies." Youngman appreciates its ability to generate and customize pages quickly and easily, but finds it "horribly, frightfully slow on the server, and its server extensions are not always compatible with other products."
Quite often, combining different products produces good results. Lail mixes Lexis-Nexis Connections32, which does most of the processing, with FrontPage and Adobe's PageMill. The combination, he says, works "pretty well." Cohen says that coordinating the work of multiple users is a key feature to look for in authoring tools, and "the only one that takes a stab at it is FrontPage."
Making Your Site Come Alive
The Web is emphatically NOT a text-only medium. With the right combination of software, you can deliver the magic of color, motion, shape and interactivity.
The most basic level is on-screen graphics and photos. Small's site takes photos from the newsroom Leaf system and desktop scanners, converts them in Photoshop or DeBabelizer and posts them--"nothing fancy here, but it works just fine," he says. For their graphics, the choice is usually Macromedia's FreeHand or Adobe's Illustrator to create files and Photoshop for Web-conversion.
Youngman uses DeBabelizer from Equilibrium for compression--"It's phenomenal for reducing file size"--and Johnson-Grace technology to compress for the America Online platform. For on-screen graphics, he says, his team relies on "buildable, stackable GIFs with GIFBuilder." Otherwise, they remain satisfied with the standard newspaper tools they've used for years.
Lail says Photoshop, Freehand and GIFBuilder work for "almost all" of their on-screen graphics. On the Windows side, however, graphics are handled by ULead's GIFAnimator and JASG's Paint Shop Pro, which also handle resizing and color balancing. The key problem they encounter is internal work flow: "Our newspaper photos are scanned at high resolution, color-balanced for our press and saved as CMYK TIFF files. Besides their being large, it's hard to quickly rebalance them, get them converted to RGB and sized to standard online dimensions. This ought to auto-magically happen!"
For on-screen photos, the combination of Photoshop and DeBabelizer "works great" at Cohen's site: "We use JPEG compression for photos, and get good quality and very small file sizes." For on-screen graphics, they use FreeHand--also great, Cohen says, but "graphics that are designed for print almost always require complete redesign for the Web because of the difference in print versus screen legibility."
The Web world of audio/video is where former print mavens may feel themselves suddenly insecure. Animation? Sound? Oy vay.
For starters, Cohen says Macromedia's Sound Edit 16 on a Mac 7500 "works great!" For Youngman, Progressive Network's RealAudio generally "works fine...although heavy use can slow the server to a crawl." Small uses simple shareware tools on Macs to edit files for the Web. "We also have access to a small RealAudio server, but we use it only occasionally." He adds that "thanks to a partnership with Thomson Consumer Electronics, we have excellent resources for capturing audio and video."
Web programming languages offer the tools needed for writing programs that run inside Web pages--for, say, an interactive quiz. At most sites, their use remains limited. Your choice of products includes Java, JavaScript, CGI, PERL and others. Small notes that one promising application is FutureTense Texture, which puts a WYSIWYG front-end design tool on Java applets. It is now in beta testing at his site.
Web Advertising
Newspapers are just beginning to post display ads on the Web. At Lancaster (Pa.) Newspapers, Allison Miller, electronic projects coordinator, reports that they have begun creating Web sites for local businesses and placing banner ads on their own site through Real Media. Small accepts Web banners from national brokers and creates them for local advertisers.
Most often, newspapers create display ads with the same graphics tools they use for online graphics and photos, although specialized products are available. Cohen's site uses Clickable's AdClick Banner Rotator, while Blizzards's site recently installed NetGravity.
Still other sites use software written in-house. Says Nolen, "All of our advertising display is run off of an internal CGI program. It not only places the advertising, but it also keeps track of impressions and click-throughs."
As for classifieds, most of our respondents use a service provider. Gale says his site chose AdOne because "it gets us a much more sophisticated system than we could develop on our own. For instance, their AdHound features e-mail ads to users based on a profile they fill out. We also see great value in being part of a larger classified database rather than off on our own."
Nonetheless, some pioneers are developing their own tools. At Lail's site, classified advertising is handled by an internally created Visual Basic program. His staff also gets an assist from Lexis-Nexis, which provides a filtering tool that sorts through their Atex-based ads.
Cohen's site uses an in-house product that marries Atex ads with images from their Autologic Information International Inc. ad-pagination system, converts them to tables in Oracle, and generates Web pages on the fly in response to user queries.
Small's site doesn't have Web-only classifieds. They are, however, working with Sysdeco (now Atex) on a Web migration to manage liner ads as searchable text and display ads as sortable Acrobat PDF files.
A number of off-the-shelf packages can provide information about how many "hits" an ad gets. Nolen's site uses WebTrends to measure daily, weekly and monthly usage. "This is a great piece of software. It handles our advertising and content measurements. It provides us with a ton of very valuable information in an easily read format," he reports.
Youngman measures his audience via a combination of products from I/Pro, Open Market, and Interse. He laments that some vendors' proprietary algorithms are "too arcane to understand."
Hontz says his site has "definitely outgrown" the basic GetStats package he has been using. Lail recently purchased MKStats: "It works and provides us with most of the information we want. But it doesn't try to figure out how many individual users we have, which would be nice to know."
Databases and Search Engines
Databases and database search engines allow your audience to conduct over-the-Web searches for content on your site. Newspapers are divided on which products work best.
Oracle and FileMaker Pro are clear standouts in the database category--at least in terms of the number of sites using them. Cohen finds Oracle "very powerful, with good Web-export routines." The drawback, he says, is that the software requires "hard-core" database administrators and programmers. His site doesn't have a search engine yet. But Cohen believes that the ability to search among Oracle's tables would be a big plus, and has an evaluation process under way.
You may want to use several database applications, tailoring each to a particular set of needs. For example, Small's site uses FileMaker Pro "for small databases that will get only modest traffic, and Butler SQL for databases that require multi-threading and heavier traffic. Both perform quite well on the Web and are fairly easy to query." He supplements these applications with the Tango search engine from EveryWare, which can query FileMaker, Butler or any ODBC compliant database, "and you don't have to be a programmer to understand it. Most of our site eventually will migrate to a Butler database queried by Tango."
Youngman's site also uses different database applications --ObjectStore, Sybase, Oracle, Access and Paradox--for different needs. "All have their individual uses," he says, though "object-oriented databases clearly have the most promise. WebObjects is another contender." He finds the Excalibur search engine "very powerful."
Lail's site uses both Delphi and Oracle. His staff is not too happy with the Excite search engine: "We ran into problems using it on an NT machine hosting multiple sites. Finding a new search engine is a high priority. [Excite] crashed our system too often."
A third strategy is to rely on an Internet Service Provider for your database and search needs. Nolen's site is indexed daily for search purposes by its ISP, which uses an Architext indexer and displays it with Excite, a package that leaves him no more enthralled than it does Lail.
Hontz is working with his local ISP to co-develop software called Megaware. It has turned into a powerful tool, he says, "but being part of the development process can be painful and frustrating."
Tools of the Future
If you want to hear an online manager guffaw, ask him or her about Web-enabled editorial front ends--systems that can generate content for either print or the Web. Lail says, "I've never seen one, although I've heard they exist somewhere over the big beyond." He notes that their current front-end system from ATS is "not 'Web aware' enough." This situation is changing however. The "venerable and ancient" Atex front-end at Small's site, for example, will soon be replaced by a sleek, new CCI Europe system, which includes a robust Web-output module.
Electronic chatting and messaging changed forever the notion of the lonely computer nerd. Today, nerds are us. Hontz's site uses a message-board package called Net.Thread by eshare, which is "pretty basic, but it gets the job done, and we haven't had any user complaints." Small's message boards run under NetCloak, a Web-macro manager for Apple servers. "We can do threaded message boards, and the sports boards are extremely popular."
Overall, electronic-chatting software still has a way to go. Lail uses iChat's. It's nice, he says, "but having to download a client may put off some people." NetForums "is not very user friendly, but the price is right." Lail notes that the latter package has problems with message deletion and the timeless and ubiquitous, "not enough memory." Youngman says the electronic chatting package they use "is a kludge."
Mostly, our respondents haven't done anything but sniff products that allow you to take in orders and payments over the Web. Youngman's site is the exception: They're using OM-Transact from Open Market, and, he says, it "works like a charm."
Web-site management software is supposed to offer the same content-management functions as newsroom editorial systems. Ask Cohen about it: "Ha! Ha! This is one of our biggest problems; we have no way of preventing authors from stepping on one another's toes. We're looking at several packages."
Most users find that the available site-management software still leaves something to be desired. David Spound of the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Mass., for example, is using SiteCheck, Adobe SiteMill, and BBedit: "I need some better tools here," he comments. Others say, "We don't use any special tools for site management," and "We use our brains."
Words of Web Wisdom
Are you confused yet? Feel like you're drinking from a fire hose? Cohen offers some simple advice to those venturing into the brave new World Wide Web: Budget for software you don't yet know you'll need. Invest in automating processes that CAN be automated--don't pay people to do robots' work. Budget for training, seminars and conferences. Hire good designers, preferably people with experience in interface design.
And hold your breath. The ride has just begun.
L. Carol Christopher is president of Christopher Communications in Berkeley, Calif. E-mail, cchristo@weber.ucsd.edu; phone, (510) 444-7841.
Sources
Dave Blizzard, Sun Media Corp., 333 King St. E, Toronto, Ontario M5A 3X5. E-mail, Blizzard@canoe.ca; phone, (416) 947-2222; fax, (416) 947-2209.
Val Cohen, The Orange County Register, 625 N. Grand Ave., Santa Ana, Calif. 92701. E-mail, val_cohen@link.freedom.com; phone, (714) 953-4908; fax, (714) 543-3904.
George Frink, Fayetteville Online, 458 Whitfield St., Fayetteville, NC 28306. E-mail, frink@foto.infi.net; phone, (910) 486-3580; fax, (910) 486-3545.
Bob Gale, The Herald, 1213 California St., Everett, Wash. 98201. E-mail, gale@heraldnet.com; phone, (206) 339-3433; fax, (206) 339-3435.
Dan Hontz, The Arizona Republic, 120 E. Van Buren St., Phoenix, Ariz. 85004. E-mail, dhontz@pni.com; phone, (602) 271-8000; fax, (602) 271-8813.
Jack Lail, The Knoxville News-Sentinel, 208 W. Church Ave., P.O. Box 59039, Knoxville, Tenn. 37950-9038. E-mail,lail@knews.com; phone, (423) 521-1848; fax, (423) 673-3480.
Allison Miller, Lancaster Newspapers Inc., 8 W. King St. P.O. Box 1328, Lancaster, Pa. 17608-1328. E-mail, amiller@lancnews.infi.net; phone, (717) 291-8791; fax, (717) 291-8685.
Derek Nolen, Albuquerque Journal, 7777 Jefferson N.E., Albuquerque, N.M. 87109. E-mail, webmeister@abqjournal.com; phone, (505) 823-3875; fax, (505) 823-3994.
Jay Small, Indianapolis Newspapers Inc., 307 N. Pennsylvania St., Indianapolis, Ind. 46204; E-mail, jaysmall@starnews.com; phone, (317) 633-1240; fax, (317) 633-1220.
David Spound, Daily Hampshire Gazette, 115 Conz St., Northampton, Mass. 01060. E-mail, dspound@gazettenet.com; phone, (413) 584-5000; fax, (413) 585-5222.
Owen R. Youngman, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611. E-mail, OYoungman@tribune.com; phone, (312) 222-4179.
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