[Mycroft] Bringing in new customers

[Alan Bramley]

Matthew A. McGuigan wrote:
> Alan,
> 
>  :-)   I think the news feed for last 'n' plugins added is a great 
> idea!  Yes it can be done and it is not that hard.  We have something 
> similar on the findmycroft page, though not available as a standard 
> feed.  Having the feed recognized and available is a good thing, so I 
> think we should work on having one.

OK, that's good to hear it's not too difficult. I hate to sit here 
dreaming-up these things without having the knowledge to implement them 
myself. Anyway, if this is going to be an automated message then we 
should make sure it contains all the right words and phrases so that it 
gets caught by a variety of searches. For instance: "Mozilla", 
"Mycroft", "Sherlock", "search plugin", the name of the plugin site and 
it's URL. Also, a link back to the Mycroft home page.

> I think a blog is a creative idea, but I think it would be a lot of work 
> and I'm not sure it would be helpful to us.  Please correct me if I'm 
> wrong.

Using a Blogging tool to populate a database in conjunction with an RSS 
tool to push-feed the information makes a powerful combination. Of 
course, you may then want a Query tool to access archived entries. At my 
workplace we are just beginning to look at using these possibilities for 
use on our intranet. The benefits being that we can avoid many megabytes 
of broadcast emails duplicated on everybodies hard drives (all of which 
is killing our backups). So, perhaps in the coming weeks I'll be able to 
understand what's involved a little better. I know you can get ready 
made 'blogging kits' from various places which are highly configurable 
(eg. http://cafelog.com). So perhaps it will be more of a bolting 
together job rather than a ground-up design.

Anyway, you may well be right here. It will be extra work and perhaps 
the project is not yet big enough for the benefits to outweigh the 
effort. Certainly, there's no harm in adding it to our wish list we can 
always think about it again at some future time.

Regards,
Alan