To learn more about ICCA, just visit their site at http://www.icca.org.

New site features
One way you can combat the financial crisis blues is to listen to your constituents. For ZATZ, probably our most important constituents are our readers - you. Every so often we get requests, comments, demands, and other feedback about the various ZATZ sites. Usually, those requests are valid and helpful (however, once in a while, we're advised to do things I don't think are actually anatomically possible to do).

Figure A shows two new features we've added in response to a few of the more anatomically-plausible reader requests. In fact, they're good ideas and their implementation into features will make our sites better and more valuable to you.

FIGURE A

Here are two features new to our sites.

RSS articles-only feed
Although we were one of the first publishers to offer RSS feeds, we didn't offer full-content feeds until about two years ago. We created a feed that included full news items from our news page and a reasonable chunk of articles as they published.

Some DominoPower readers didn't like that format. Richard Schwartz, on his Power Of The Schwartz blog, didn't like that our news covered general interest IT news. I disagree, of course, which is why we carry it - I think it's important for Lotus people to be aware of the rest of the world, but I digress.

Anyway, some other luminaries weighed in and, eventually, the post reached me. Being ever the responsive editor, three months after the posts showed up, I responded, saying we'd add an articles-only feed, putting the request on our programming to-do list.

Well, uh, our programming to-do list was loooooooooooooong. It still is. But we finally, almost two and half years later, got to the request. Since Richard's site has the tagline "Never Underestimate The Power Of The Schwartz", I'm proud to announce that DominoPower has been influenced by the Power Of The Schwartz and an articles-only feed is now available.

You can subscribe to it from any article, and the only items you'll see in the feed are articles. No news. After all, no news is good news, right?

Email a friend
Having friends is good. After all, isn't that what Facebook is all about? I get emails from people I've never met, wanting to "friend" me on Facebook. I'm not sure if I'll ever be accused of "palling around" with someone, just because I let them "friend" me, but, hey, it seems polite.

Anyway, back in the day, we had an "email a friend" feature for our articles. The idea was that you had friends and we had articles, and this feature brought the two together. Unfortunately, when we changed server technology, the friend feature didn't change along with us. It broke.

Remember that to-do list I talked about? Well, it was loooooooooooooong. It still is. But we finally got around to building a new "email a friend" feature and it's now live and seems to work.