Testimonials

Metacentric helped the movie review site Popcorn Monsters create a news feed for their latest member reviews. Site manager Ken Cochrane kindly sent these comments about Metacentric managing director Philip Shaw.

"I kept hearing about this new technology called RSS. Not knowing anything about RSS I turned to Phil for help. With his help I was able to setup a simple movie review feed on PopcornMonsters.com, and I am now in the process of adding more feeds for other parts of the site. People can subscribe to my feed and find out when new movie reviews are available without ever needing to visit the site."

"At first I was kind of skeptical of the whole thing, but now that I tried it, it is easy to setup, and I am now getting more visitors then ever. Phil was great, he holds your hand through the whole process, from beginning to end. He was able to answer any of the questions that I had, and I recommend his service to anyone who is thinking about adding RSS feeds to their site."

Ken Cochrane
http://www.PopcornMonsters.com/

Case study

Ken Cochrane and the Popcorn Monsters team are all very competent Web developers, but were unfamiliar with news feed technology. They clearly had the ability to create their own news feeds and only needed guidance and support to help them do the job.

Over a series of email exchanges in December 2004 we were able to identify the most appropriate technology choices for the Popcorn Monsters site. The movie reviews were already available in the site's database, the team were already using dynamically generated pages, so we decided to adapt an existing page template.

Philip Shaw provided guidance about setting the Web server to issue the right Internet media type for the feed, and how to shape the movie review details into news feed format. He used extracts from existing Web pages to show how each part should be included in the feed.

By early February 2005 the first Popcorn Monsters news feed was ready for testing. Philip Shaw gave advice on some minor technical corrections, Ken added a last modified date to the feed and other Dublin Core metadata. We also discussed methods for optimising the performance of the feed, promoting the feed with auto-discovery and registering the service with news feed search engines.

The Popcorn Monsters news feed was launched to the public on 1 March 2005.

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