Each month, we need to produce about 27 articles of 1,000 to 2,000 words each, 12 tip mailings, and about 240 news stories. We need to generate hundreds of pages of HTML and about 230,000 lines of HTML code. In order to make this possible, we developed an editorial production system called ZENPRESS that does all the heavy lifting for us. ZENPRESS is a tool that generates magazines online. Unlike a lot of the other HTML generators or production tools like, say Vignette's StoryServer, ZENPRESS knows about the structure of certain kinds of publications. Although we use it primarily to generate magazines (including the front page, tables of contents, back issues, paginated pages, and so forth), ZENPRESS also knows how to make technical manuals (including cross-linking all the API calls) and hub sites.

The idea is that our writers and editors don't need to worry about Web technology or HTML. They write their articles, determine the titles, sidebars, headers and such. Editors decide which articles are features and which are spotlighted on the home page. We can even decide when to throw a page break (which generates a new Web page with links backwards and forwards) and when to force a "keep", so the page doesn't break. There are about two hundred more editor-friendly features, but this article isn't about ZENPRESS specifically, so I'll save that for another day.

In order to generate handheld content, we need to develop the capability within ZENPRESS. In particular, this is a rather large project because we need to tell ZENPRESS how to create a completely different set of pages intended for a handheld (including all of the formatting differences inherent in moving from an 800 x 600 pixel screen down to one that might be as small as 160 x 160).

One of the key aspects of this process was developing software around a concept called "shareables". ZENPRESS shareables are chunks of data that are derived from the original content of the journal but are now available to be shared by other systems. For example, to create a version of an article that's to be downloaded to a handheld by AvantGo, we'd need to pull that article from it's original form, modify it for AvantGo, and then share it so AvantGo could get to it.