Free Online Publishing Manager - PitchLeads

The world of dictionaries is changing: you need to find out how to become part of the online world in a way that generates income and that supports your brand

• Are you looking to shape your brand image online by attracting a large audience?
• Do you plan to market your value-added content through a Freemium/Premium offer?
• Do you want to be able to create a free-access online version of your dictionaries in a cost-effective way?
• Do you need expertise and advice to maximize your content and respond to the real things that people are searching for on the Web?

IDM PitchLeads is the tool that will let you meet your aims:

Overview of the PitchLeads Framework

PitchLeads is a framework that enables publishers or developers to easily set up a cutting-edge dictionary website. By cutting-edge we mean a website compliant with the latest web standards: quick to respond to searches; optimized for search engines (SEO rules); themeable to simplify your interface updates; and automated so that you can save time on your data updates.

PitchLeads is packaged as a Software Development Kit (SDK) for creating applications that publish structured and indexed content on a dictionary website. These applications will provide SEO-optimised URLs for the published content, and include a search engine to enable rapid retrieval of the content. Unstructured content (such as information about your company) can be published on the website for pages which do not conform to the structure of the indexed content. The SDK is a Java library and its associated documentation, to be used within a Spring environment.

PitchLeads Features

PitchLeads features are:

• Dictionary publication
• Tree oriented data structure navigation
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) capabilities
• Search result pages with spell check feature
• Advanced document display (including sounds, media and Flash)
• Unstructured content publication
• Themeable Interface: you can easily change the whole interface template and strings in the interface (for localisation for example)
• Caching mechanism
• Ad serving
• Document of the Day (to provide, for example, a dictionary 'Word of the Day')
• Geo-localization Feature (allows for decisions to be taken according to the country of origin of the visitor)

Dictionary publication

The platform can publish multiple searchable data dictionaries online. A dictionary is a set of Unicode XML entries (documents) that share the same structure. Each document needs a set of metadata, including for example the title of the word being defined. This metadata powers filtering operations and SEO.

An auto-complete-search feature is available on a dictionary by dictionary basis, helping the end-user to complete their search queries.

Tree-oriented data structure navigation

The SDK also supports a tree data structure that can be used for navigation in the structure content, or for any other purpose. It was primarily developed to allow thesauruses and topic trees to be accessed online. Every node of the tree can be linked to one or several documents of the structured corpus. This gives you flexibility to add value to your data with features that can only exist electronic formats

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) capabilities

The SDK helps to generate the sitemaps. SEO information required on pages (like title & meta) can be generated partly using the themeable interface. Each page can declare that it belongs to a given set of pages (entry display, help pages, etc) and have some of its SEO information pre-filled by the template. This makes it much less time-consuming to make sure that your dictionary is correctly optimized.

Search result pages with spell check feature

Each dictionary will generate a search Index for document retrieval. These indices allow for full-text search on any number of elements. Indices can apply weighting rules for relevancy sort and call for the display of an HTML snippet to drive the end-user when selecting a result.

The Index also contains information about what is supposed to be displayed in the auto-complete list and in the browse list.

If there is no hit in the Index, a spellcheck is run against the typed terms. The matching words are sent to the user and displayed in a list. When the user selects an item from the list, a search is run with this corrected word, ensuring that there will be results for the search.

Advanced document display

The PitchLeads platform is optimized to display XML content. Inside the XML, some standard elements are supported and provide cross referencing between documents in the same dictionary, documents in another dictionary, search results from a particular dictionary or related documents.

Using other standard elements, it is possible to link directly to binary media: embedded sound-files and images can be displayed in the content. This allows you, for example, to link the pronunciation of a word to its dictionary entry. Note that the data processing chain performs a cleaning step to remove missing media reference from the content's XML.

Unstructured content publication

It is possible to publish any kind of content on the Website along with the previously indexed dictionary content. The non-dictionary content can be included in dynamic pages in dedicated snippets, or be displayed in its own pages.

This is what is used to create the home page, the help pages, and any page that contains mostly static content. These unstructured pages can contain assets such as images and videos, and use the full power of the Template Engine for their header, footer, layouts, etc. Because of this, updating the textual content of these pages is relatively easy and does not require technical skills.

Caching mechanism

PitchLeads caches pages to ensure quick response time. It allows you to cache snippets of HTML pages, to define expiration rules for a pattern of URLs and set different cache durations internally (for the server cachind) and externally (for the browser cache).

Ad serving

PitchLeads allows you to serve ads in your online dictionary application. Ads can be constrained to predefined geographic zones and their frequency of display is customizable. Ads can be any HTML code snippet defined by the ad serving agency of your choice.

Document of the Day

PitchLeads can be set up so that each day it publishes a new 'document' explicitly defined in the input data read by the SDK. The document of the day  (which could be a 'word of the day', 'quote of the day', 'tip of the day' or anything else that your dictionary can provide) is not a random pick inside the dictionary, but a document chosen by the publisher for a specific day. The document has an HTML representation that can be displayed in the web application, and a text representation that can be used for instance in an RSS feed.

Geo-localization Feature

Used with a GeoIP database, PitchLeads allows the application to dynamically take decisions based on the location of each website visitor . It provides possibilities such as generating JavaScript and showing or hiding the content of a webpage depending on the user's country of origin.

Designing Online Dictionary Applications and Handling Hosting Operations