Though a media outlet's content management system often covers everything that a site needs on a day-to-day basis, there are sometimes projects that the CMS doesn't handle very well. In my short time out of school and in the workforce, I've discovered several free services that have capabilities the CMS may not.
Yahoo! Pipes
Ever feel a need to aggregate a bunch of RSS feeds? Yahoo! Pipes rocks for that sort of thing. There's a little bit of a learning curve (and, unfortunately, not a ton of formal documentation...Google is definitely your friend, there), but it's totally worth it.
Feedburner
I use Feedburner, now owned by Google, at the station for one thing: its headline animator. Just pop an RSS feed into it, make your own background (or use one of theirs), stick it in your e-mail signature, and presto! It's a quick and easy way to promote your site with every e-mail you send. Feedburner can also be used to track RSS subscribers or send out daily e-mail digests.
Dynamic Drive
Dynamic Drive is a site I've used since I first started designing pages. It's great for easy scripts to make navigation snazzier or create interactives without knowing Flash. Just be cautious: these scripts can be like super-rich candy, where too much can be a bad thing.
Wordpress
Instead of teaching a reporter the ins and outs of a content management system that might not have tiers of editing capabilities for blogs, why not go with a reliable third-party service like WordPress and simply use an iframe to integrate it into the site? WordPress has a fairly narrow generic layout that works nicely for this purpose. There are drawbacks to this approach -- namely, you can't track stats on individual pages -- but for now, it serves our purposes nicely.
That's it! Feel free to list your suggestions in the comments; I may include them in a future post.Labels: free, journalism, social media