by Helmy Giacoman |  November  1, 2021

One of the key advantages of having a live blog for digital publishers is the SEO boost that real-time news coverage provides. In this post we look at the technical side of SEO in our Live Blog platform and explain how you can make the most of this in your settings and on your website.

Part 1:  ESI and SEO

First, let’s take a look at what Live Blog is, and how it relates to your other content. In essence, Live Blog is a curated timeline of news updates marked with a timestamp. In technical terms it is a group of HTML elements that can be embedded into third-party websites by using an embed code, which takes care of loading that curated timeline of news into the host website.

To host their live blog, many publishers use an iFrame embed code – an HTML element that is used to insert content from a third-party source – which is the quickest way to integrate content from Live Blog into their website. For users coming to the host website, there is no visible difference between Live Blog and any other content.

Here is an example iFrame embed code:

<script src="https://test.liveblog.pro/embed.js" defer></script>
<iframe id="liveblog-iframe" width="100%" scrolling="no" 
src="https://test.liveblog.pro/lb-test/blogs/6172fcbdab5f4af0268694e2/index.html" 
data-responsive="yes" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

For search engines, however, the iFrame element (officially called an Inline FRAME) used by default by Live Blog makes the content unreadable and, as a result, does nothing to improve the quality and quantity of your website traffic. That’s because the iFrame is like an envelope, and the Live Blog is like the letter inside. If you want the postal service (i.e. search engines) to read the letter, you have to provide them specific instructions to do so.

The way we recommend to open the envelope and present the letter is by activating the Live Blog advanced ESI (edge-side include) feature  in your theme settings.

To activate the ESI option, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your Live Blog instance and click on the burger menu on the top left to open the “Theme Manager.” 
2. Open the “Settings” dialogue of your theme (based on the default theme) and switch on the option to “Optimise the Live Blog output for ESI.” 
3. Your output will now be rendered in a way that it can be included right into your webpages making use of ESI technology. Please note that if switching on this option, the output will not work properly as a normal iFrame embed anymore, since we are removing some markup from the output that is required for this purpose. 

After switching on the rendering for ESI, the markup of the “LIVE” output will change and editors can copy the respective URL and put it into their articles to be handled by ESI. The URL can be found in your general settings under “embed code” and look will something like this:

<script src="https://test.liveblog.pro/embed.js" async defer></script> 
<esi:include src="http://test.liveblog.pro/lb-test/blogs/6172fcbdab5f4af0268694e2/index.html"/>

Part 2: Configuring your servers

Now comes the more technical part. Many websites use a caching engine – such as Varnish – which sits in front of a server to deliver content and balance load. After toggling on the ESI embed feature in your Live Blog instance, the next step is to work with your infrastructure team to configure the backend of your website, including any caching engine, to recognize this ESI content. 

Fortunately, most developers will be able to do this rather quickly. But If you need tips or have other questions about Live Blog, get in touch with our support team at the Live Blog help desk.

Looking for a better live blogging solution? Try out Live Blog from Sourcefabric for seven days free, no strings attached. Get your trial version here.

by Gregory Bruno |  August 4, 2021

When news breaks in the German state of Bavaria, there’s a good chance Passauer Neue Presse (PNP) has broken it. And when PNP’s news reaches its audience, there’s also a good chance that it was delivered via Live Blog, Sourcefabric’s professional live-blogging software.

Since 2017, PNP has been using Live Blog to report the events of the day. What attracted PNP’s editors to the platform was its ease of use, and Sourcefabric’s commitment to data protection and an open-source ethos. But what has kept PNP a Live Blog customer is the platform’s ability to tag and deliver content to specific audiences, a feature that became essential during the pandemic.

Roland Mitterbauer

“Before Covid-19, we mainly used Live Blog for urgent reporting and breaking news, where the situation changes constantly,” like election nights, disasters, and important political stories, explains PNP Deputy Editor-in-Chief Roland Mitterbauer. “But during the coronavirus crisis, we began using Live Blog for long-term coverage for the first time,” a decision that was done out of necessity.

Because PNP’s coverage area is huge – as the largest German state by landmass, Bavaria makes up one-fifth of the country and is home to some 13 million people – PNP editors needed a way to segment content based on regions and topics. Covid-19 was (and remains) a global story that affects people differently by region. The delivery of news content, therefore, must be targeted. With filtering and tagging options built in, Live Blog makes this easy.

“Our cover area is large. To serve it, we maintain a single Covid-19 blog, but each post in this blog is tagged with a region so that we can offer single blogs for each region in our distribution area by using Live Blog’s features (such as social media integration and photo galleries). We include these features on regional special pages that are enriched with data journalism and include the live blogs as a textual supplement.”

PNP’s Live Blog use case is similar to Norway’s NTB news agency, which has adapted their instance of Live Blog to target audiences with greater precision. NTB has also configured their internal publishing systems to publish content directly to Live Blog, which editors there use to enhance breaking or live event coverage with feature stories and multimedia content. PNP has also tested integrating its publishing system with Live Blog, via RSS feeds, to make it easier to target content to content-specific blogs.

Even after Covid-19, PNP plans to continue experimenting with Live Blog as an additional resource for publishing and production. “We’ll be using Live Blog again for the federal election in September [2021],” Mitterbauer says. “Moreover, with the Live Blog Reporter app for Android and iOS, all our editorial teams have access to Live Blog and so they can report directly from their smartphones. Our claim as a local newspaper is to score with regional content in the federal election as well and to report on the elections in the region.” Live Blog stands ready to assist.

Looking for a better live blogging solution? Try out Live Blog from Sourcefabric for seven days free, no strings attached. Get your trial version here.

by Gregory Bruno |  June 21, 2020

For tech titans, product launches are good theater, and great business. In 2020, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), an annual showcase of the company’s latest products and features, drew 23 million online viewers, dedicated fans who hung on every word before opening their wallets. 

Tech product launches are also good for news organisations, as gatherings like WWDC present opportunities for media outlets to reach new audiences. But for editors, product launch events can present a quandary. Does a new phone feature or fresh OS really warrant a feature story, or would a news brief, photo, or social media update suffice?

With Live Blog, editors don’t need to answer this question. That’s because a product launch can be covered by any combination of the above content, and then some.

Designed by journalists for journalists, Live Blog is jam-packed with features making coverage of product launches seamless for newsrooms, and endlessly engaging for audiences.

For instance, the Live Blog backend allows for easy post scheduling, a great feature if you’re covering an embargoed event or if you want to push out a post at a specific time – linked, say, to when a key speaker is scheduled to take the stage.

Published posts can also be individually shared to social media simply by mousing over the sharing arrow in the lower right corner of a post in your blog’s timeline. This makes it a breeze for readers to amplify your content and raise your blog’s profile. 

Live Blog is also great for teams. With no limit to the number of users, and with granular user access controls, privileges can be adjusted to ensure that only certain users have publishing rights. Team members can file their copy, photos, or videos directly to the blog’s backend, and editors can control what goes live, when.

Once published, users can even filter content based on tags, from oldest to newest, or vice versa. This allows readers to decide for themselves how they want to engage with your content. For live product launches, it might make most sense to see the oldest post first, reading the blog in chronological order without scrolling to the bottom and reading up. By contrast, readers of a Live Blog covering a sporting event might be interested only in the results, so seeing the newest post on top would make most sense.

Finally, Live Blog can be configured to ingest content from any CMS, making it easy to add Live Blog as a publishing channel. Using a third-party application called Integromat, you can create a webhook to automatically pull content into your Live Blog instance. This content can then be set to auto-publish to your Live Blog or require approval from an editor. At NTB, Norway’s leading news agency, editors on the Sports Desk use this feature to create a richer blog experience for their readers, supplementing live event coverage with in-depth features and analysis from the NTB wire. News organisations covering product launches could deploy a similar setup, taking their coverage to a new level.

Public product launches have been part of the tech business long before Apple made them synonymous with Silicon Valley. But while inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and Guglielmo Marconi organised events in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to present their communication devices (the telephone and wireless telegraphy, respectively), the reach for these gatherings was limited to the scientific and technical communities.

 If only they’d had a Live Blog.

Looking for a better live blogging solution? Try out Live Blog from Sourcefabric for seven days free, no strings attached. Get your trial version here.

by Gregory Bruno |  May 21, 2020

Norwegians love live sports. In 2019, for instance, more than 1.2 million people – nearly a quarter of the country – tuned in to watch Norway dominate the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships (Norway won 25 medals that year; Germany, in second place, took home just nine).

For print and online news producers – in Norway and far beyond – live sporting events present a coverage quandary: how can their journalists deliver content that audiences want even as broadcasters deliver the action in real time to people’s living rooms? At NTB, Norway’s leading news agency, the answer lies in Live Blog.

NTB’s sports journalists have begun using Live Blog to supplement the news agency’s live event coverage blogs with in-depth analysis, multimedia, and long-form reporting. Terje Alstad, Head of Sports Data at NTB, says when done properly, a live blog provides content that broadcasters cannot.

“When you have photographers or journalists on site, they can send whatever they have into the Live Blog feed,” says Alstad. “For example, if a Norwegian skier was angry that he didn’t get a medal, our photographers might capture a photo of the guy throwing his helmet, which can give readers of the Live Blog fresh insight and on-the-ground colour.”

NTB Sports is also using Live Blog to share stories from the new agency’s wire that might be of interest to sports fans following live event coverage – like a regular article from the race, a feature story, or a photo essay.

Until now, live blogs played more of a supporting role in the news agency’s sports coverage. Data from the Norwegian Football Federation, for instance, is fed into NTB’s internal backend and delivered to clients as box scores and automated stories; Nettavisen, one of Norway’s most popular online news sites, uses NTB data to power its football live blog. But last year, after NTB set up an easy integration between Superdesk, the newsroom’s open-source CMS, and Live Blog, to report on the constant flow of Covid-19-related news, other desks within the news agency started to take notice. NTB’s Sports Desk has been among the most ardent converts.

Today, Alstad says NTB is delivering its enhanced sports Live Blog content to some of the country’s largest news publishers, including Nettavisen and Dagbladet. Even TV broadcasters have signed up. NTB is a “third party for TV 2,” says Alstad, meaning that NTB’s “reporters are choosing and sending stories to the broadcaster for inclusion in their live blog so that TV 2’s editors don’t have to.”

Alstad adds: “This integration between Superdesk and Live Blog has improved our sports coverage; it is kind of the missing link for our live blogs. Now, we can supplement our live event coverage with interviews and other stories, material that can be managed by editors on the desk. With this extra content capability, Live Blog’s usefulness has been extended.”

Looking for a better live blogging solution? Try out Live Blog from Sourcefabric for seven days free, no strings attached. Get your trial version here.