 |
 |
GREAT Frontier Web Site for
March 30, 1998
Albanian Daily News
Since the internet is forbidden in this country, the editor sends the email though an Immarsat satellite phone connection to dial into an Italian ISP. |
URL: http://www.albaniannews.com/
Mathieu Nouzareth, describes the project:
We have used Frontier to build a system that builds a daily newspaper (the Albanian Daily News) completely automatically.
Here is what happens everyday:
- The editor living in Tirana, Albania, sends an email each night at about 9 pm with all the articles in a single ASCII file. Since the internet is forbidden in this country, the editor sends the email though an Immarsat satellite phone connection to dial into an Italian ISP.
- Every 20 minutes, Frontier checks if a new email has arrived in a special box. We use TCPCMD with Netevent to do that.
- If a new email is detected, then Frontier downloads the mail and does its magic...
- It analyzes the file to make sure it is a valid file
- It then transforms the email into separate articles (about 40 each day) in the db by extracting date, author, title and body of each article
- Render the pages (some articles go into the free section whereas others go into the paid section) with prebuild templates. It also extract leads of the main articles to be displayed on the front page.
- Update the archive section
- Update a FM Pro database (we use FileMakerLib for that) that allows people to search (with Tango) the newspaper by author, title, date or string in the body of the articles.
- Send an email to a mailing list server (running Letter Rip) to broadcast the main titles of the newspaper to thousands of registered users.
We now have more than 12,000 articles in the Frontier DB and although it has grown to more than 70 meg. in size, Frontier handles it without a hitch. I wonder what we would have done without the flexibility and the power of Frontier! We are also eagerly awaiting the release of ContentServer because workflow management of web sites is what we need right now.
- Mathieu Nouzareth, mathieu@webconcept.fr
Chairman & CEO, Web Concept S.A, France, http://www.webconcept.fr
|
