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Getting your stories listed on BroadwayStars
by James Marino

  • BroadwayStars collects and aggregates links from around the internet related to Broadway and other theatre. We've been doing this a couple of times per day for 13 years. One thing that most people don't know is that up until now, everything was collected by a person, coded by hand, and then published.

    This was easy when there were just a few theater-related websites. But now we need to stay on top of 20+ websites dedicated to theatre, at all hours of the day. In a typical week we publish links to over 100 different websites.

    We are getting tired.

    So, we are moving to a new publishing system that is collecting links via RSS feed, then creates the HTML coding, and then the humans are going to categorize them for publishing. This will make for a much more timely routine of updates for our readers as well as being able to widen the scope of our news collection.

    But, we need your help!

    If you are a publisher of theatre content, please send us a link to your RSS feed, even if you think we have it.

    If you already have an RSS feed, great. Please make sure that it adheres to RSS 2.0 standards and has the fields below.

    If you don't have an RSS feed you will need to create one that has the following fields:

    <item>

    <title>

    <link>

    <guid>

    <description>

    <pubDate>

    <author>


    How your content will appear on BroadwayStars:

    <title> = Headline. Top line in bold, possibly larger type

    <link> / <guid> = will be the deep link into your site. If your link is different than guid, we will follow the guid.

    <description> = for our purposes is the subhead (or deck) that is below the headline on BroadwayStars. It is a tease that should be short. We will clip them if they are longer than 200 characters (including spaces).

    <pubDate> = time live on your site. Things on BroadwayStars are generally newest on top. This will help us manage this aspect.

    <author> = byline, writer credit that will be found after the headline.


    Your feed will look something like this:

    <item>

    <title>Trust Star Zach Braff on His Wild New Role and Life After Scrubs</title>

    <link>http://www.broadway.com/shows/trust/buzz/153282/trust-star-zach-braff-on-his-wild-new-role-and-life-after-scrubs/</link>

    <description>You probably recognize boyish leading man Zach Braff as Dr. "J.D." Dorian, the rubber-faced leading man in the TV medical comedy Scrubs, which recently ended its run after nine seasons.</description>

    <pubDate>Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:49:33 -0500</pubDate>

    <guid>http://www.broadway.com/shows/trust/buzz/153282/trust-star-zach-braff-on-his-wild-new-role-and-life-after-scrubs/</guid>

    </item>


    And when we publish it, it will look something like this:



    If you are totally lost about RSS, here is some technical documents that you can read:

    http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html


    Most publishing systems like WordPress, Blogger and Movable Type will automatically give you an RSS feed.


    If you have any comments or questions, please do not hesitate to call or write.

    Monday, August 16, 2010 | Item Link


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