On the internet, things are not always as they seem. A typical website is not necessarily 100 per cent hosted in one place – when you go to the site, content is likely to download to your browser from a number of sources: images from one host, videos from another host, feeds from many hosts, and so on. This can be used to the advantage of the site owner, easing site maintenance and creating dynamic content. All it takes is a little lateral thinking, a small initial time outlay and (sometimes, but often not) a small financial outlay.
I had been writing the Family Lore blog for nearly three years before Family Lore Focus was launched. Family Lore was a mix of serious and not-so-serious posts on the subject (usually) of family law, with a few reference resources thrown in. The idea behind Family Lore Focus was to provide a more substantial location for the serious material, with the blog continuing primarily for the not-so-serious.
Family Lore Focus was initially a fairly straightforward conventional website, with all the content on the web host, Yahoo. The site comprised a number of sections, including news (and cases), articles, reference material and podcasts. However, as the site grew it became increasingly time consuming to update and maintain it, for example writing the daily news/case updates directly to the web page and keeping all previous news archived. I therefore decided to put the news, cases and podcasts onto their own blogs (although the podcasts themselves remain hosted on Yahoo), and “integrate” the blogs into the site using sub-domains. Thus, the Family Lore News blog is at news.familylorefocus.com, the Family Lore Case Digest blog is at cases.familylorefocus.com and the Family Lore Podcasts blog is at podcasts.familylorefocus.com. All three feed back to the front page of Family Lore Focus via widgets (see below), with the news and cases forming the main content of the front page. This arrangement has the advantage of easily adding news and cases at any time of day (each news item or case report is one blog post), without touching the site. As blog posts are automatically archived, it also means that I do not have to worry about archiving. Further, the blogs provide the feeds for the front page without having to set up your own feeds, and are also fully searchable (although the search function in Blogger leaves something to be desired).
As mentioned, I use Blogger as my blogging platform. It may not be the most highly featured platform, but it is free, easy to use, reliable (Blogger hosts the blogs) and has plenty of free templates, which can be personalised with little need for html or css knowledge.
The feeds from the blogs go into “widgets” (applications that you embed on a web page) created with Widgetbox Pro, which are customisable (to an extent) and appear on the front page of the site. The only downside of this arrangement is that they are not 100 per cent reliable, meaning that, for example, if the news feed is down then the reader will have to go to the news blog to find the news. Widgetbox Pro costs $30 a year, and enables you to create up to ten widgets without any attached advertising, as is the case with most free widgets.
Both the News and the Digest feed into Twitter using Twitterfeed, and form Family Law News on Twitter. This is very popular, attracting more followers virtually every day. Of course, the tweets link back to the blogs, driving traffic to the site.
A new feature of the site is the Family Law Wiki, which is intended ultimately to be a useful resource for practitioners and students, covering all aspects of family law and procedure. After toying with the idea of hosting the wiki myself on Yahoo, I went for the “safer” option of a hosted wiki, and use Wikispaces, which has the advantage of a ”˜what you see is what you get’ environment, although the formatting options are somewhat limited. For an additional monthly fee I am able to give the wiki my own domain name, and it is also on a sub-domain of Family Lore Focus (wiki.familylorefocus.com), thereby again “integrating” it into the site.
So, Family Lore Focus: a site of parts, some hosted on Yahoo, some on Blogger, one on Wikispaces and a touch of Twitter thrown in. The arrangement works well, the only disadvantages being that the blogs and Wiki do not quite have the same “look and feel” as the rest of the site (but, I feel, are sufficiently customised to be obviously part of the site), and the feed problem. However, so long as the feeds are reasonably reliable I believe that the advantages (particularly ease of use) outweigh these disadvantages.
What of the future? I do not know, but I’m sure more new web technologies that will add new features or functionality to the site are around the corner, or perhaps they already exist and I’m not yet onto them.
In summary, my advice to anyone involved with a similar project is to continuously keep abreast of existing and new web technologies and consider whether they could be useful to the project.
John Bolch is a solicitor with more than 25 years’ experience specialising in family law. He is author of Family Lore, the first family law blog in the UK. He is also the author of Do Your Own Divorce, a guide for litigants in person. John now works as a freelance writer.
Email john@familylore.co.uk.
