On 3/2/11 2:24 AM, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
Our church need(ed) to send info to clients "over the wire" in a guarenteed fashion. They already have a website, which is under-utilized / not visited as often by every one. RSS didn't work out as it should / could since many non-IT-savy-folk don't know what it it, how it works, or how to use it. Jabber is a no-go for this same reason.
The church needs to send weekly news (events, updates, announcements, etc) to their clients. Email doesn't work well since a lot of it gets send to spam folder or simply never reach the end users since places like Yahoo block anything and everything that doesn't originate from their own network. SMS isn't very effective either.
Just pay one of the commercial bulk email/newsletter senders to deliver it. They know how to avoid being marked as spam.
So I was basically looking for something, which works in the same way as Google Notify (let's use a different example) which logs onto a server, queries the DB for info and displays it to the user. But, I'm not a C++ / C# / JS programmer, so I can't write this myself. I hoped maybe someone knew of something that I could use, maybe a framework or something to build something like this?
Any/all of the examples people of jabber/rss/web server would work on the server side. The piece you are missing is a way to make the user run the appropriate client app.
Someone suggested Adobe Air, but I don't know, or code Adobe Air.
These guys do something in the lines of what I want: http://www.zanews.co.za/category/daily-news/ - if you download the desktop player on the right-side you'll see. http://www.nuron.co.za/Nuron/index.aspx also has something similar, but you need to use their proprietory backend to communicate with the end users and they force banners adds onto each client desktop.
I need something that isn't bound to, or limit within a certain company.
Maybe I'm asking too much?
Yes, if the end user has to start an app, they could just as easily have an icon on the desktop that is a link to your web page. Or they could put your rss feed url into google reader and see it with their web or mobile aggregater. But they probably won't do that either. Email is probably the best shot at something where they don't have to start something special. Maybe you could give out USB sticks with apps that will hijack their computers...