(Interview) Feed.us Skins Web Publishing Cat with SaaSy Cache and XML Gadgets

By Jason Campbell (@jemorycampbell) Feb 20, 2008

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Feed.us CMS and Content Delivery Platform

Feed.us has taken a shot at the content management market and one that strikes a distinctly different approach to solving the typical problems with light-weight publishing. Via the combination of software-as-a-service (SaaS), XML data transformation and flexible input and output APIs, Feed.us thinks they've carved a foothold in the market. If they've played the cards right, it could be one that's going to make life easier for a whole lot of folks.

Come along for the ride as we spent some time in the mind of Feed.us co-founder, Rick Stratton.

Create their own “Content Delivery Platform” and build a business around it, of course.

According to co-founder Rick Stratton, Feed.us is “is a hosted content management system or a content delivery platform… [the] intention is to host the content and then provide a variety of APIs to deliver any content to any site or application hosted anywhere on any platform.”

Rick was kind enough to sit down with us to banter a bit about this latest venture into the SaaS CMS arena:

CMSWire: So let's start with the original company, I believe it was called 1871 Media… Why was that company started and why did you choose to sell it?

Rick Stratton: It started in 2000 out of the dotcom failure. We had worked for a company that had like 3 dotcoms, including a CMS company. It ran out of money and we were able to buy the software that we created for very, very cheap. So we started selling that software to customers.

We started doing work for political campaigns and newspapers and that became our focus. Basically 1871 Media had a suite of publishing products: newsletters, website management, ads and ecommerce. We had about 150 clients. We did everything from hosting, site design to even writing.

We weren't great at site design, and didn't have the resources to make our software great. We always wanted to just do the software and let others create/control the website design. And hosting sites is a pain as well… when Godaddy sells it for $2 a month! So our goal was to find a way to just do a hosted publishing service.

RSSCMS.com was a raw, first attempt. A rough draft so to speak. Also, I'm not a programmer nor am I a designer but I've always wanted to be both. I can do a bit of both, but I'm not great. I guess my strength is that I'm like the end-user. We build products that should work for people who just want to write, add content, pages, etc.

CMSWire: So RSSCMS.com was the “first draft”, what happened next?

RS: It made me realize that I could mashup websites without being a programmer. And it got our CTO fired up to make a hosted solution. But we realized that javascripts just can't be used to make websites. Because it's client-side and Google cannot see the text. Similar to Flash.

Plus, with all the software we had created for 1871 Media, it had gotten old and bloated… 4-5 years old is like ancient. There's so much more cool new stuff in the last couple years. We wanted to start from scratch and make something that would work great for us.

One thing is that I have a network of like 50 sites. And I've always paid a person to put them together. Plus they've all had separate CMSes for each one. The big thing is making a product that works great for my network of sites. That's the other motivation. Making something that really works for us.

There are, obviously, way too many CMS products out there. But there are very few hosted or “content delivery” versions out there.

And to have our [system] work as a hosted solution — solving that problem [how to make the content available to search engines] was our main focus. The RSSCMS way — with javascript — was super easy. Just like Adsense… copy/paste a little code and the content flows from a remotely hosted server. But widgets are not great… slow pages, etc.

And Google can't see the text. That's a deal breaker.

CMSWire: That is my question. How does the text get spidered?

RS: John, my partner, is an old-hand with caching systems. So he had a dream one night of how it could be done using a caching object.

CMSWire: Wait a second, did he really have a dream?

RS: We struggled with what to do to replace the javascript. John Welborn (my partner/cto/programmer) had been working on a big caching project and seriously woke up in the middle of the night with the realization of exactly how we'd replace the javascript with caching. Some folks dream in French, he dreams in cache.

I'm not the most technical person, but the basic [idea] is this. There's one locally hosted file. It's a PHP or ASP or ASP.Net or even Ruby on Rails file. And there's one directory with read/write access setup [on the customer's server].

It could be on the $2 GoDaddy windows hosting, or on a server in someone's basement.

That local file accesses our server and downloads content. It's a form of caching. Then, on Feed.Us, we have a “script-o-matic” that creates two lines of code that are placed into the Website's files. This part is just like a javascript widget — just like Adsense.

Using the Sciptomatic, you can choose what content gets pulled off our servers. By date, by author name, by date range, by categories, etc. Then you choose what fields to display using XSLs. Our system is all via XML, so the XSL tells the system what fields out of XML to display.

CMSWire: Let me see if I understand. I am writing a blog post using Ecto or Blogger.com — something that supports the MetaWeblogAPI — and I post my content to a Feed.us server, right?

RS: You can type directly into feed.us, but our hope is that you will use something that you enjoy.

CMSWire: Feed.us has an editorial interface?

RS: Yes, with a WYSIWYG editor, etc. We want you to be comfortable: send an email, log on to feed.us, use blogger, whatever.

CMSWire: My content is now sitting on a Feed.us server somewhere. I configure my webhost with the aforementioned file and directory. What's next?

RS: Next is the site files. Feed.Us doesn't handle the templates. It doesn't have some sort of file system. We don't want to control or host your site. So you can have any designer make a site for you. These days that means CSS/XHTML.

CMSWire: So my content goes into a database?

RS: Exactly, into our database and comes out via XML.

CMSWire: Where do the two lines of javascript go on my side?

RS: They go right into the area of your HTML where the content would normally go.