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September 26, 2003
Using Blogger for Benton Headlines
Given all the fun I've been having over the last few days with this new blog of mine, I've decided to experiment with using Blogger to see if it can be used to publish Benton's Communications-Related Headlines. For most of the last eight years, Headlines was put together by hand-coding the HTML into a text editor - not very pretty stuff. More recently we've used Contribute software to edit the Headlines homepage, but frankly, Contribute isn't very elegant and we spend more time fixing the mistakes it makes when we cut and paste the day's news into the template.
So, despite the fact that today was my day off and I should have been enjoying the lovely autumn weather reading a book on my balcony, instead I hunkered down at my Mac and tried to put together a Blogger template based on Benton's website template. It took me a good four hours to get the damn thing even close to right, but after coming back from a satisfying Mexican dinner tonight, I managed to get the template in basic working order.
So if you go to our Communications-Related Headlines page, the content you see will have actually been added via Blogger Friday evening while watching a well-censored broadcast of Blazing Saddles on TV tonight. For now it's pretty basic stuff, but using a blog service will allow us to post stories with greater ease, and (much more exciting) allow us to start syndicating our news via RSS feeds -- assuming I can get this RSS stuff to work. But hey, I think I'm off to a decent start considering I was a total blog version nary one week ago. So stay tuned over the coming days and weeks, and visit Communications-Related Headlines often. Hopefully my interns and the rest of the Benton staff will take to it like a kitten frolicking in catnip.
Anyway, enough of this computer stuff. Back to Blazing Saddles.... -ac
Posted by acarvin at September 26, 2003 10:31 PM
Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article
