Publisher Network: Technical Requirements

There are four technical requirements your site must satisfy to qualify for inclusion on NewsNow.

1. Employ distinct and unique URLs for every article

Make sure each article you publish has a distinct, or unique, URL. We recommend you insert the date or a unique number into the URL. Ideally, create a folder for each day and number the article pages within this folder sequentially. e.g. http://www.whoyouare.com/news/20061225/a-christmas-story1.html

2. Employ distinct and unique headlines for every article

Make sure each article you publish has a unique headline.

3. List your articles in an RSS feed, Atom feed, or dedicated headlines webpage

To reduce the load on your server and ensure we are continuously informed of the articles you publish in a timely manner, we require that you provide us with the address of a dedicated headline page for us to scan. This can be an RSS feed, an Atom feed, or a simple HTML page containing just headlines linking to articles.

If you don't already have an RSS or Atom feed, please use the following steps to set up a dedicated headline page for us to scan:

1. Create a dedicated headline web page for our spider to visit, e.g. http://www.whoyouare.com/NewsNow/
   For an example visit: http://www.arsenal-world.co.uk/newsnow/newsnowdist.asp
2. Place on this page the headline-hyperlinks for all articles published, but ensure that the page references at least every article published within the last 24 hours but does not reference any article that is more than sixty days old.
3. Make sure the hyperlink text is exactly the headline text. This is the text we will display on NewsNow.co.uk.
4. Make sure the hyperlink URL links to precisely the web page containing the article in question.
5. Don't place any other links on this page as we instruct our software to harvest everything and this would cause erroneous headlines to appear on our website
6. As this page will only be scanned by our spider and not viewed by the public, please remember not to include any graphics or other design elements. This would only increase the load on your servers and ours.

As an example, your dedicated headline page should look something like this:

<a href="/news/20061225/shoppers1.html">Shoppers go mad for presents at Christmas shock</a>
<a href="/news/20061225/eatfood2.html">People eat food at Christmas shock</a>
<a href="/news/20061226/rubbish1.html">Rubbish disposal problem on Boxing Day shock</a>

4. Insert HTML comment tags that top and tail your article text

Our systems need to be able to analyse the text of each article you publish, in order to determine to which of our feeds they are most relevant. To ensure we can properly identify where on the webpage the article begins and ends, you will need to edit your website templates as described below.

N.B. If you do not do this, or do not do this correctly, your articles will not receive the maximum possible exposure on NewsNow, and their display may be considerably delayed.

Insert HTML comment tags in your article webpage templates as follows:

1. <!-- Article Start -->

   should follow the headline but immediately precede the first paragraph of the article

2. <!-- Article End -->

   should immediately follow the last paragraph of the article.
3. If your articles contain a byline or specify an author:

   <!-- Author Start -->

   should immediately precede the author's name;
   

   <!-- Author End -->

   should immediately follow it.
   

Notes

NewsNow aims to scan your feed site every 10 minutes, however there will be variations in this frequency due to the performance of the internet and the sites we scan, so this is not a guarantee. Thereafter, our automated processes will analyse each new article found, and determine in which of our website topics that article would be most appropriate (though please do not expect to see all your articles appear in any particular website topic).

In the event that our systems are experiencing difficulties in analysing your articles - the most common reason for this is that you have not included Article Start and End tags within your web pages as detailed on step 4 (above) - there may be significant delays before your articles appear on NewsNow, and the breadth of topics in which your article is placed will be considerably reduced.