The Daylife Team often works with publishers to build new verticals within existing sites, or add more pages to existing sections that are being managed by a small professional editorial staff. That's a big part of the value that Daylife brings: we let publishers create automatic inventory that they can use to drive ads, to enrich readers' experiences, and to supercharge the shrinking newsroom.

There are several more examples of the output of such efforts here Cookbook.: USA Today used the Daylife APIs to enhance their flights and cruise blogs with more and more topic pages about the cruise and airline industry. The team at Turner built four tightly focused sites using the API for NBA, PGA, NASCAR and MLB.

The Sacramento Bee has recently launched a celebrity section on their site using the Daylife API. The section provides a celebrity landing page with news stories, photos and related topics of the day. Readers can then follow links to topic pages for celebrities in news and find the most recent stories, photos, related topics, as well as quotes said by the featured celebrity and background information from wikipedia.

When building a landing page for such a micro-site, publishers are quickly presented with a tricky question: How does one present the most interesting data to the user and provide easy navigation to deeper pages beneath the landing page (eg., the topic pages). Daylife is working on technology to make that process easier, but while we're at it, we've come upon a best practice that has given good results across a number of implementations.

Here's what works: editors come up with a query that corresponds to content for the page they are trying to build, then developers use our Search API to build the landing page. For example, a query to generate a movie business landing page along the lines of the SacBee might look like this:

(actor OR actress OR hollywood OR (movie AND ("box office" OR premiere OR screening OR paparazzi)) NOT (Bollywood OR India*)

The Daylife Search API supports the rich syntax and operators of a modern search engine, enabling editors to fine-tune search queries and increase relevance of the results. If the underlying application is built appropriately, these queries can be adjusted on a day to day basis, to reflect the changes in the news, shifting editorial foci, or promotions.

Combining the Daylife Search API with a list of trusted sources can result in a very relevant, pleasing "start" page to head a targeted micro-site

The smoothest implementations of the Daylife API typically go through the following steps:

• Publisher defines the scope of the application e.g. landing pages, topics pages, list of topics, galleries, quotes, navigation, favicons, related topics, widgets etc. We always help advise the publisher as to what is possible with our platform (which is pretty much anything! .. no kidding.).
• Publisher's editors come up with a list of topics that they want to build pages for. These topics could be existing Daylife topics or conceptual topics that the editor forms a Search query for.
• We work with the publisher to ensure that Daylife has enough coverage from relevant sources for their application. We always encourage the editors to provide us a list of RSS feeds for news content that is relevant to their application.
  
• Publisher comes up with the designs for the pages. We work with the designers quite often to help develop the IA and design for the pages.
• Publisher's developers start coding for the project. The sample code on the cookbook often helps the developers to kick start the integration with our APIs. We work with the developers to come up with the right combination of API calls and parameter values for the application and also focus on issues like caching and performance.
• We always encourage the publishers to provide enough time for testing the application. In addition to the regular testing practices, we encourage and help the publishers to focus on performance testing and the data quality evaluation.
• Make it live!

If you have any questions about how to build a section on your site or launch a new micro-site, feel free to drop us a comment here or via email.