Cross-Publisher - What Should It Be?

Let's think about which sites or social networks it would be useful to organize cross-publication of their (or the reproduction of others, strictly within the bounds of decency, of course) articles. Cross-publication is the generation of the original article in formats suitable for publication on two or more unrelated resources.

This is often demanded for various reasons: protecting the publication from inaccessibility to reading on one or two resources (due to server failure, administration ban or moderation period), to increase the popularity of its publication due to mass use (spam, but, of course, in good faith amateurish; about unscrupulous - a little lower), to save publication time, to collect your articles on any one copyright resource. A big plus will be that the base of the original sample articles will be easily stored as an archive in copies and restored if necessary, reading or re-publishing, even if all other previous copies have disappeared.

Undoubtedly, this is necessary for each resource in general, but nobody (or almost nobody) doesn’t bother with it, because most often the question is solved by the “how to take it out” method - or the author stores the texts of the articles in the archive, or hopes for the reliable reliability of the publication location ( a site that doesn’t portend years of its collapse, Google Wave or something simpler and less known). Often the articles themselves lose their relevance. In any case, texts in any design and pictures to them in the archive are enough to not ask the question of duplication of publications.

What about unscrupulous spam? It is possible to guarantee that spammers already have such systems, but they are not “targeted” to popular sites with strict moderation, but to forums, social networks and mailing lists. Therefore, you can not worry about their benefit :). For the remaining authors, they need the opportunity to publish in 1-3 places or a little more, while strictly observing the rules and the order of publications, as required by the administration of resources. Moreover, commercial systems of any type can be found by searching for " publishing articles , article publishing's ".

When there are more than one such places, and there are no automatic formatting tools, the author’s publishing system is reduced to the simplest and least expensive - texts in the archive or simply on the disk of one of the computers.

But sooner or later, such chaos will begin to organize itself and such a system will appear that, like a snowball (like Yeoman), will recruit and maintain tens and hundreds of publication templates. Unlike scaffolding tools, 2 other goals are pursued here:

1) to create a metalanguage suitable for maximum coverage of publications, or several options for the complexity of such a language (most likely, based on Markdown + HTML);
2) to support publication on resources with the maximum coverage of the features of a particular resource so that there is a minimum of additional actions (due to the specification of all site-dependent features in a common format like XML:) .

It is necessary to support not only the format of the text of the article, but also the accompanying fields: heading, tags, something specific (publication hour). The format of the sample will look like text or XML / JSON / INI with a description of the fields, for example:

<автор>Пупкинд Василий<автор>
<название>Моя первая супер-статья в системе публикаций
<текст>Сидел я как-то в интернете...

<теги><тег>примеры статей<тег>система публикаций

Project preparation systems are distinguished by the fact that they create initial templates for their further development to the needs of a particular project. They are more similar to the templates of the same spammer letters or low-grade seoshny texts whose task is to start building something. The task of the article publishing system is to complete the design of an already written article.

Technically, the publication looks like in the web interface you need to fill in several (or many) fields and send the created one. Or maybe somewhere to form a letter in a certain format. For publications via the web, you will need to have current templates for reformatting the sample article and filling in the fields that the script can execute on the publication page.

Publisher rules change. Somewhere there is captcha, somewhere - ambiguity or lack of data. Therefore, the second thing you need is to show the author instructions with steps to complete the publication (publication wizard). Scripts for instructions can keep active and authoritative users of this resource up to date. Therefore, hundreds of places of publications does not mean that one person or team will monitor their serviceability. Support for each resource - by enthusiasts who themselves would benefit from this in the rapid publication of their articles.

Theoretically, these specialists can insert spam links or comic texts into publication scripts, so their reputation matters, and the publishing system cannot be a single repository for a number of resources. The repository may contain the core of the system and several universally recognized places of publication, for the quality of which the kernel development team could be responsible. The remaining hundreds of resources are connected to it as “plugins”, and not all at once, but exactly those that the author of publications needs and whose quality he could trust.

This moment, apparently, creates obstacles for creating a publication system. Without a system, the author himself is responsible for the typed texts and their sending. But it pays knowledge of the rules of publication, the type of tags and bugs of the engine. (As, for example, in Habr, for the H3 tag, to look vertically symmetrical, you need to have one empty line above and 0 empty lines below the tag. And they don’t change anything for years so as not to break anything :).)

Nevertheless, because You can start by choosing 2-5 permanent resources to publish. For the first 2, Github.io and Habr (or satellites) can pass (taking into account the specifics of the authors).

Resources in the support circle

The next question is what other resources can be included in this circle of favorites? It is easy to provide support for social networks (G +, VK), but probably few people are interested in this from local authors. Maybe LJ. It has a peculiarity - there are many possible publication templates, you need to support a whole group of them. There are technical sites (ixbt, 3DNews), there are a number of sites with a limited number of authors - 3DNews just do not let authors in, but users can often post well-written articles on forums.

If you look at the authors of other topics - journalism, politics, psychology (cooking, home, building, hobbies), then they would have just such a system would be useful (often some sites are not allowed to publish what is allowed on others), but the question is in how many such authors will master the system with a sample article and publication masters? They are probably the second tier of users who will go to the system when its simplicity is worked out.

Therefore, to work out the system, it is worth restricting yourself at first to 2-5 sites and thinking about “plugins” for connecting others.

Questions to Authors

1. What, apart from Github.io (and social networks), would you suggest for maintaining a database of articles for an arbitrary author? What resource does friendly hosting provide for publishing anything with perhaps article templates?

2. In what order of preferences are sites for re-publications (habr not considered)? For example, G +, BK, OK, FB, LJ, liveinternet, slashdot, reddit, twitter?

The survey below does not oblige to anything, but will reveal the relative popularity of other resources among readers of the article (I’m not aware of the characteristics of many of them and I have write access, for example, to only one or two; they could support publication in them other interested people). (I will not be able to update the list, as this will lead to a reset of votes each time.)