NextPression Announces Automatic Site Building

By: Meg Campbell Dallas-based software developer nextPression has come up with a way to create dynamic Web sites, complete with their own URLs, on the fly.

Web sites using NextPression's managed service can enable end users to create tailored URLs that draw content from the host site, explains NextPression's Chris Feola. The micro-URLs also will automatically place advertising or any other content on the page. Once the end user bookmarks the page, it will automatically update each time it's opened.

Users link sets of key words to create the sites. Host sites can also create configurable templates, Feola says. All data is in indexed XML. "Someone can build a site on the fly that refreshes, and populates with sponsored content," he explains. "You can build as many as you need, and it can be configured by the end user, or use preconfigured templates done by the media provider."

Feola uses an elementary school as an example. A person trying to keep up with a school's news and activities by establishing a search engine alert would have to wade through a mass of irrelevant information. Creating a page within the local newspaper's Web site, however, would provide more useful results that appear in an accustomed editorial style. The paper also could load the page with local ads.

"It's the next thing after search," Feola says. "We call it post-search."

NextPression developed the application that drives the service while building an automation tool for the Texas Press Association, which needed a tool that would crawl through Texas' 500 newspapers to find legal notices, Feola says.

Now showing the application to a newspaper group and online travel service, nextPression was launched several years ago by Belo veterans Chris Feola and James Jennings to develop products and services around unstructured data. The company also developed a Web site monitoring tool that users can program for highly defined microsearches.