Cross article publisher - what should it be?

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

This is often required for various reasons: protection of a publication from being inaccessible for reading on one or two resources (due to server failure, a ban by the administration or a moderation period), to increase the popularity of its publication due to mass character (spam, but, of course, fair amateurish; about unfair - just below), to save publication time, to collect your articles on any one author's resource. A big plus will be that the base of the original samples of 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 no one (or almost no one) does not “bother” because most often the issue is resolved using the “how to take out” method - or the author keeps the texts of articles in the archive, or hopes for the proven reliability of the place of publication ( a site that does not foresee its collapse for years, Google Wave or something simpler and a little known). Often, the articles themselves lose relevance. In any case, the texts in any design and pictures to them in the archive is enough to not ask a question of duplication of publications.

How about unfair spam? You can guarantee that spammers already have such systems, but are “sharpened” not on popular sites with strict moderation, but on forums, social networks and mailings. Therefore, you can not worry about their benefits:). For other authors, the opportunity is needed to publish in 1-3 places or a bit more, while strictly observing the rules and sequence of publications, as required by the administration of resources. In addition, commercial systems of any type can be found by searching for " posting articles , article publishing ".
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When such places become more than one, and there are no automatic formatting tools, the author’s publishing system is reduced to the simplest and low-cost — 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, which, like a snowball (like Yeoman), will recruit and support dozens and hundreds of publication templates. Unlike scaffolding tools, 2 other goals are pursued here:

1) create a metalanguage suitable for maximum coverage of publication sites, or several variants of the complexity of such a language (most likely based on Markdown + HTML);
2) maintain publication on the resources with the maximum coverage of the features of a particular resource so that additional actions are minimal (due to the specification of all site-dependent features in a common format like XML: <title site = “facebook”> Special title of the article </ title> ).

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

<> <> <>  -   </> <>  -  ... </> <><> </><> </></> 

Project preparation systems are different in that they create initial templates for further refinement of them for the needs of a specific project. They are more similar to the templates of the same spammer letters or low-grade text of a seoshny, the task of which is to start building something. The article publishing system has a task to complete the design of an already written article.

Technically, the publication looks like in the web interface you need to fill in a few (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 actual templates for reformatting the sample article and filling in the fields that the script can execute on the publication page.

The rules of the publishers are changing. Somewhere there is a captcha, somewhere - ambiguity or lack of data. Therefore, the second thing you need is to show the author the instructions with steps to complete the publication (publication wizard). Scripts for instructions can keep up to date active and authoritative users of this resource. Therefore, hundreds of places of publication does not mean that one person or team will monitor their serviceability. The support of each resource - by the 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 system core and several generally recognized publishing places, for the quality of which the kernel development team could be responsible. The remaining hundreds of resources are connected to him as “plugins”, and not all at once, but exactly those that the author of publications needs and the quality of which he could trust.

This moment, apparently, creates obstacles for the creation of a publication system. Without a system, the author himself is responsible for typed texts and sending them. But pays knowledge of the rules of publication, the type of tags and engine bugs. (As for example, for Habr, for the H3 tag, in order 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 over the years so as not to break anything :).)

However, you can start by choosing 2-5 permanent resources for publication. For the first 2 can get off (taking into account the specifics of the authors) Github.io and Habr (or satellites).

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 feature - 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 — authors are simply not allowed to enter 3DNews, but users can often publish well-designed articles on forums.

If you look at the authors of other topics - journalism, politics, psychology (cooking, home, construction, hobby), then such a system would be useful for them (often some sites do not allow publishing what is allowed on others), but the question is In fact, how many such authors will master the system with a sample of the article and the masters of publication? They are probably the second echelon of users who will go to the system when its simplicity is worked out.

Therefore, in order to test the system, it is worthwhile to limit ourselves to 2-5 sites first and think about “plug-ins” for connecting others.

Questions to readers-authors

1. What, besides Github.io (and social networks), would you suggest to maintain a database of articles for an arbitrary author? What resource provides friendly hosting for publishing anything with, perhaps, article templates?

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

The survey below does not oblige to anything, but will allow to reveal the relative popularity of other resources among the readers of the article (due to the peculiarities of many of them, I myself am not up to date and have access to the recording, for example, I have only one or two; other interested people). (I will not be able to update the list, as this will lead to a reset of votes each time.)