Resources

Overview

Resources are the content you send to people and publish on your website — buying guides, one-pagers, case studies, recorded demos, FAQs. They live in one library so the same guide can be emailed to a contact on Monday and appear on your resources page on Tuesday without being stored twice.

You will find them under Content → Resources.

The three kinds

A resource holds its content in one of three ways, and you pick whichever suits what you have:

• A file. Upload a PDF, a slide deck, an image. Straightline stores it and serves it.
• A link. Point at something already hosted elsewhere — a YouTube video, a page on your own site, a report on somebody else's. A YouTube link gets a thumbnail and plays inline in the preview.
• Written here. Type or paste the content directly. Nothing to host and nothing to upload, which suits a short guide, an FAQ, or a note you want an AI agent to be able to quote from. Every article an SEO agent writes is one of these.

You need one of the three. A resource with none of them is refused, because there would be nothing to send.

Tags

Tags group resources, and they do more work here than in most of the product: they are what decides which resources appear on which part of your website. See Feeds below.

Add tags on the resource form. You can type a new one and it is created as you save.

Active and published

Two switches, and they mean different things:

• Active — whether the resource is usable at all. Switch it off to retire something without deleting it. An inactive resource cannot be sent and never appears on your website.
• Publish to feed — whether it appears on your website. This is the switch your site actually reads.

A resource can be active but unpublished, which is the normal state for something your team sends by hand but does not want listed publicly.

Search metadata

Published resources carry three extra fields that decide how they look in a search result:

• Meta title — the blue link. Around 60 characters; longer is cut off mid-word.
• Meta description — the grey text beneath it. Under 155 characters. Write a reason to click, not a summary.
• Slug — the last part of the URL. Lowercase words separated by hyphens.

Leave them blank and the resource's own name is used, which is usually fine for something you only ever email. Fill them in for anything you want found.

Sending a resource to a contact

From a contact's page, or from the API and MCP connector, you can email one resource to one person. The email goes through your configured sender with the same tracking and unsubscribe handling as any other message, and it is recorded on the contact's timeline.

Feeds — putting resources on your website

A feed is a named set of tags pointed at a website. A resource appears in a feed when it is published and carries those tags. That is the whole rule — there is no separate list to maintain, so a feed can never fall out of step with what you have actually published.

Feeds live under Content → Feeds. A feed with no tags is every published resource, which is what a site with a single resources page usually wants.

Your website reaches a feed in one of two ways:

• The script embed builds the list in the browser after your page loads. Quick to install, but a search engine's first fetch sees an empty container, so the content is unlikely to be indexed.
• The server-rendered version is fetched by your own server while it builds the page, so the words are in the HTML everyone receives first. The feed page gives you the snippet.

If you want the content found by search engines, use the second. See SEO Agent → Getting it indexed for the detail.

Both ways authenticate with your Feed Key, from Account → Feed Key. It is read-only and only ever returns what you have published, which is why it is safe to have in your page source.

Deleting

Deleting a resource removes it from your website on the next page load and from anywhere it was listed. It does not un-send anything already emailed.

If you only want it off the site, unpublish it instead — that is reversible and keeps the content.

Tips

• Tag as you create. Retro-tagging a hundred resources to set up a feed is a bad afternoon.
• Write the meta description for anything published. It is the advert for the page, and the default — the first line of the content — is rarely a good one.
• A resource written in Straightline has no separate hosting to break. For short content, it is the most durable of the three kinds.
• Keep slugs stable. Changing one changes the URL, and anything already linking to the old address stops working.