Welcome to our new newsletter for Neptune users, Neptune News. Now that Neptune has been in production for some time, I thought it would be helpful to send out periodic newsletters highlighting new features and providing some tips and tricks. (I'm sure a lot of you are very diligent about reading the update log after logging into the control panel, but there may be one or two of you that miss new features announced there.) As always, please be sure to report any bugs you find, or think you found, to bugs@neptune.ims.net. If you have any suggestions for Neptune, send them along to suggestions@neptune.ims.net. A lot of the features we add to Neptune are the result of suggestions made by our customers!

Headlines Extra

Ever wish you could list a stack of nodes somewhere in your content rather than over on the left in the sidebar secondary navigation? This is often desired when, say, listing a bunch of articles. This is what the Headlines Extra does. It allows you to place a particular "parent" node's children in content, rather than in the secondary navigation. A great example of its usage is on the recently-launched Simpson Street Free Press site. They organize their articles (which are just regular hidden nodes) under newspaper sections, and then use the Headlines Extra to list articles on their parent section node page. You can optionally set the Headlines Extra to display the meta description from the pages, and show a "read more" link. The end result is a nice stack of headlines with synopses. Give me a buzz if you'd like to see how to use the Headlines Extra on your site!

RSS Feeds

You may have noticed a flurry of RSS feed activity noted in the updates log. I'd like to summarize all of the RSS feeds that are available to you. A lot of folks prefer to view syndicated content on their portable devices or their browser, and only look at the site when there's an item of interest. RSS feeds are an important way for you to get a summary view of your content to your users.

• Site RSS feed - /rss.jsp
  This is the overall RSS feed for your site. Chances are you are NOT ready to use it, because it uses the META/RSS Description text, which you've likely left blank on a lot of your pages. However, this is a good motivator for you to enter Meta/RSS Descriptions. When someone links one of your pages on Facebook, for example, the META/RSS Description is displayed along with the link, and, perhaps, a thumbnail of an image on that page. If you do have well-populated META/RSS Descriptions on your pages, you can add an RSS icon to the browser location bar on your site by toggling on the site_showrssicon setting. For an example, take a look at our site's RSS feed.
• Headlines RSS feed - /headlines-rss.jsp?parent_nid=nid
  I talked about the Headlines extra above, and another piece of that extra is an RSS feed that provides the same list of headlines in RSS format. Again, the META/RSS Description text is used. For an example of this, look at Simpson Street's science headlines RSS feed.
• Comments RSS feed - /comments-rss.jsp?cid=cid&pid=pid&nid=nid
  You may have a page containing a short article followed by with lots of comments, like if you're using Neptune as a blog. If there's a lot of comment activity, it's nice to have an RSS feed to keep up with them, so you can use the Comments extra's RSS feed. A nice example of this is the comments that come into my site that lists gas stations that serve pure (ethanol-free) gas, something of concern to folks like me that ride older BMW motorcycles, or folks with outboard motors and other small engines. Take a look at the pure-gas.org comments RSS feed. An RSS icon is automatically linked above your comments if you do a stylesheet tweak; give us a call if you'd like to enable the RSS icon on your comments.
• Calendar RSS feed - /calendar-rss.jsp
  Naturally, if you're using the Calendar extra to display events, you'll want your users to access those events in the form of an RSS feed as well. For a nice example, take a look at the Madison Symphony Orchestra's events RSS feed. In this case, the RSS feed displays all of the information that's entered in the Calendar extra; the link points to the (optional) URL that's entered for the event.

Site Down?

IMS prides itself on very good reliability and uptime, but bad things can happen, like flood attacks that can cause the server to respond slowly. Mark and I both get a text message from the alert system at our ISP, Supranet, within 10 minutes, but if you see that your site is down, don't hesitate to give us a call. We can often catch and fix it before the alarm is triggered. If it's off hours, stay on the line and leave a message, that texts us as well. (We do restart the server every morning at 4 AM, to resolve an obscure conflict between Searchblox, our nightly site indexer, and the Paypal code. That takes the sites offline for about one minute.)

What's a Blog to You?

A lot of folks have asked "does Neptune support blogging?" Well, sure it does - write a page and add the Comments extra underneath it, you've got a blog. But maybe you think a blog is something else. If you have specific features you'd like to see in a Blog extra, let us know. We're looking at various third-party blogs that can be integrated into Neptune, but it's not clear to us what the key feature set is for our users. Of course, Neptune already can display the content from a Blogger, Wordpress, or Blogspot blog via the Blogger extra. If you've got one of those, we can hook that up to a page on your Neptune site.