The Saint and Web 2.0

The Saint's website has been running since the Web 1.0 days of 1995, and in those days each web page's HTML had to be hand-coded in a text editor, such as BBEdit and then FTP'd up to the saint.org web host by me and me alone. Web 1.0 for The Saint was a one-way posting of static information that you hoped someone would find and read (this was called "Pull", as it was hoped that the sites content was so good that the sheer gravity would pull users to it.

With Web 2.0, The Saint's website is much more collaborative and automated. The use of Blogger means that an entire dream team of Saint experts from around the world can add, edit, or delete news articles in a rich web-enabled editor using only a web browser. These articles can have pictures, links, video, and other files. Additionally, all of the Saint fans who read these articles can use the comment feature to add their thoughts and feedback -- giving us collaboration, discussion, and ideas about the next article.

Each News article written in Blogger has an RSS syndication feed powered by Blogger and enhanced by FeedBurner to promote, gauge, and facilitate adding to your home page, like My Yahoo! or iGoogle. This allows people to see the news headlines on their favorite site, instead of having to visit Saint.org every day to check to see if there is any news. The Feedburner RSS feed "pushes" content to the user, which then brings them to the site. Feedburner also features a News Headlines module which appears on the home page of www.saint.org and automatically lists the links to the most recently posted news articles. In addition, FeedBlitz "Subscribe Via E-Mail" was added to allow users to have the Feedburner RSS feeds sent automatically to their e-mail address whenever anything has been posted.

Web 2.0 also gives us the tools to allow anyone to help publicize a particular news Story about the Saint. If something catches your eye, for example, you can use Digg, Del.icio.us, Technorati, or StumbleUpon to share your links with other people. This is a great help, as it allows more people than just a single webmaster to update a list of links that are related to the same subject. For example, all of the Saint Actor pages (like Tom Conway) feature external links about that actor which are powered by Del.icio.us. By adding me to your Del.icio.us network, you can help in maintaining and adding links to important Saint sites around the web.

Statistics are another important way of seeing what information has the most interest, and if additional pages, articles, or other items are needed. SiteMeter gives quick statistics for each page, and FeedBurner gives statistics on each RSS feed usage.

And in the end, the other big change in Web 2.0 is all of the advertising capabilities for giving Saint fans relevant products for sale that are at least somehow related to The Saint. These tools, like Google's AdSense, Commission Junction, and Amazon Associates allow this site to remain up and running at no charge to the public. The advertising revenue, while slight (about $1 a day), does pay for the domain registrations and other hosting charges incurred. Please continue to support www.saint.org by visiting the advertisers and using all these Web 2.0 features to be part of The Saint's online community!

Labels: 2007, Amazon.com, Digg, eBay, Google, RSS, Web 2.0

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