Style tips for aggregated sites

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These tips are for guidance only since we are not in the business of telling other people how to run their websites. We have a good track record of referring traffic to other sites and so the better your link looks on our site then the more likely it is that people will visit your site.

Text
As a general rule please bear in mind that children may be reading your blog on the YamYam so please pay particular attention to what your write in your headline and introduction.

Try to avoid the use of SHOUTING HEADLINES ie the use of upper case characters in you blog headline. It looks bad and is not normal practice on professional sites.

Keep your headlines short and to the point.

Try and write a concise introductory paragraph to your blog post which sets out clearly what you are about to say.

Try to avoid including a long URL (hyperlink) in the introductory text of your blog since this can interfere with formatting.

Generally, if you see formatting problems with your text on our site then please try to experiment with the way in which you construct your page in your next post or in your RSS feed.

RSS feeds
Blog posts which do not include geographical location keywords in the RSS text may not be automatically included on our site.

If you are a news website then try and include the specific name of the geographical place your story covers somewhere in the RSS text, otherwise it may be incorrectly indexed or will not appear.

Consider offing more than one RSS feed on your site by using tags or categories on your blog to generate different RSS feeds so we can position the link to your post in the most appropriate spot on our website eg news, features, opinion, music, food, cycling etc.

Pictures
Don’t be afraid to include pictures in your RSS feed since we will only automatically generate a 60 pixel high thumbnail of the first image included in your RSS feed. If no picture is present in your feed we will usually reproduce a stock thumbnail of your site’s logo.

A picture at the start of a blog can sometimes lead to formatting problems. Ideally, if you wish to place a picture at the top of your blog then please include it after your headline and after the introductory paragraph. If a picture gets placed before the headline and introduction text, then it may be your picture’s caption that appears on our website instead of your introduction.

Please try to avoid using wide pictures, specifically banners at the beginning of your blog entry’s RSS, with a height less than 60 pixels. The banner shaped picture may get enlarged to greater than 300 pixels wide and lead to ugly formatting problems in our columns. If this presents an aesthetic design issue on your site consider including white or dead space below the banner within your image file in order to bring it up to the 60 pixels minimum height.

Watch out for third party plug-ins on your site which automatically place images at the top of your RSS posts such as smiley face ‘like’ images or social media referral images. These tiny images may automatically get enlarged to 60 pixels high if they are the first or only image our system sees.

Timing
If you have several items ready to post then try to avoid publishing them all at once. Space posts out over a period of time so that your blog or website can maintain maximum exposure. Consider at what time of the day you wish to publish and when our audience will see it and do not post-date your item.

Credits
We make sure we credit you and so we would be grateful if you could reciprocate. If you benefit by getting traffic from our site then please give us a link on your blog, or mention us from time to time. Those links will be indexed on search engines and just as our mention of you will help you rise up the search rankings, you mentioning us will too, and so more people will ultimately see your site.

Legal issues
We claim no copyright over any of your textual or image content that is aggregated on our site. It is up to you as a publisher to work within the copyright and defamation laws when producing your site. We do not manually monitor all the feeds all of the time. If you find you have made an error and you either correct your post or remove it altogether, it may take up to an hour for that change to be automatically reflected on our site. If an error remains on our site for longer than an hour, you can bring it to our attention by contacting us for it to be manually removed. If you have reason to publish an apology then please ensure that you attribute the same keywords and include it in your RSS feed so that the apology is automatically aggregated and our readers are informed. Aggregated content is not stored on our site when it drops off the aggregated list – or when it is manually removed.

These style tips should be read alongside our terms here.

Contact
If you have a website or blog which you would like to be considered for inclusion or exclusion on our aggregation list then please contact us .

We are not obliged to give specific reasons as to why a website or blog request for inclusion may be declined or subsequently withdraw.

You can read more about us here.

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