Welcome to July's issue of Neptune News. I hope summer is treating you well, and you're able to spend much more time having fun outdoors than you spend updating your Neptune site! This issue covers the new Atom Feed extra, the new Xinha WYSIWYG editor, documentation updates, Add This services and our e-commerce application, Softslate.

Atom Feed Extra

I've talked about RSS feeds, and how Neptune supports a variety of them. Another popular syndication format is Atom, and a lot of blogs and other online applications are Atom-enabled. One popular example is Wordpress, which, I recently found, doesn't work with our Blogger extra as I thought it did. So, I've created the Atom Feed extra, which is housed on your site at /atom.jsp.

The Atom Feed extra is very simple — it just displays the entries from a feed, in reverse chronological order, showing title, date, author and summary (or full content if summary is empty), along with a link to the full entry on the external site that delivered the feed. It might display a thumbnail image (like for a Flickr feed) and it may show links to attached media. It has only three Settings: atom_uri, the URI of the feed; atom_dateformat, the date format you'd like to use for the entry dates; and atom_maxlisted, which you can set to a number other than zero to limit the number of entries shown on the list.

Since you don't need any authorization to view a public feed, there is no username or password. In fact, you can put ANY Atom feed on your site. As an example, here is an Atom feed on my personal site of the photos I've uploaded to my Flickr account. In this case, I've used the Atom feed URI for my Flickr account: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=8535841@N04, which is publicly available.

Xinha Content Editor (an ode to open source)

If you use the WYSIWYG content editor, you've noticed that it changed about a week ago. That's because I discovered the excellent Xinha WYSIWYG HTML Editor, which is well-maintained, compatible with "all" browsers, and has some really neat functions, like a table editor and a button that cleans out the junk that gets pasted in from a Word doc.

Xinha is yet another example of how community-built open source software exceeds commercial software, like the Zapatec WYSIWYG editor that we used before. When you've got an active group of developers working on something out of their own interest, bugs get addressed quickly, new ideas get tried, tested and incorporated, and development continues to move forward. Almost all of the software driving Neptune, from the Fedora Linux operating system to the Apache Tomcat servlet container, is open source and updated regularly. Neptune continues to improve in performance due to regular updates to Tomcat, as well as benefiting from slick tools like Xinha and the Apache Abdera library that I used to implement the Atom Feed extra.

Documentation for Front-End-Only Extras

Until now, the documentation for extras has been located on a link on the extra's control panel tool. However, some extras, like Headlines and the Atom Feed, don't HAVE control panel tools. So, I've added documentation for those extras under the Docs link on the Control Panel. If you want to know how to use Headlines, or the Flash Image Rotator, take a look there!

Add This Services

Many of you use the Add This button as a utility link, which allows folks to share your pages via email, Facebook, Twitter, whatever. What you may not have known is that Add This supports over 300 services. For the full list, take a look at the Add This Service Directory. There is also a nice chart there to show usage statistics on the various services. You enter the services you'd like on your Add This button in a comma-separated list in the addthis_services setting on your Neptune site.

e-Commerce with Softslate

A huge thanks goes out to Scott Newman at Tech Enterprises, Inc. for helping us work out the kinks in our first implementations of Neptune e-commerce, using the excellent online shopping application from our partner Softslate Commerce. Scott runs two online shopping sites under Neptune, Tech Stain Remover and Stain-X. Scott did most of the design implementation on those two sites, so he's not only a Softslate expert, he's also a Neptune design expert now. Thanks again, Scott!