What do people use fip for

Let us know what you use Fip for – use the comment box at the bottom of this page to add to the page.

  • Straight-forward wire receipt, conversion and delivery to
  • a traditional editorial system.
  • oracle based CMS
  • FingerPost Web based wire browser
  • Search engines
    • Verity Topic
    • Glimpse
  • Fetching stories via ftp
    • On a regular basis (every 6 minutes say..)
    • on a timed basis
  • Collating Stock information into a database.
  • Formatting, Collating and paginating stox pages.
  • Generating PostScript pages or part pages – for stox pages, tables and racing pages.
  • Formatting and collating data, and then outputting system specific markup
    • Quark Xpress Tags
    • InDesign Tags
    • Fip markup for postscript block generation
    • flavours of xml
    • markup for traditional systems
    • html
    • whatever else you like …

Copy flow systems

  • Mini syndication system: editing and transmitting stories.
  • Maxi syndication system: managing the transmission of a large number of stories in a large number of formats to a large number of customers.
  • Mini ad input system for use for web ads at Associated Newspapers. Ads are extracted from the groups newspapers. Automatically expand output (as space is not at a premium on the web, all short forms are expanded (ono -> or near offer etc). Ads are made available on a web browser for checking, manual expansion, tidying upetc, and then pushed through to the web.

Projects to facilitate firewall friendliness

  • Photos, ads, wires sent to ftp server. Fip runs a process called fipremote/fipremsvr, where a fast connection is created to the ftp servers from inside the firewall, (so firewall friendly), and then data passed through this pipe for distribution throughout the Mirror Group. Several gigabytes a day being transferred and routed by this process.
  • Transmission of pdfs, layout information and ad positions/booking information fetched centrally from a large number of group titles, and ftp’d to a third party pdf archiving, and ad vouchering company. A significant amount of work is done to these pages to ensure that there is a smooth and consistent feed, depite the large number of originating systems and file naming conventions.

Tables generation and editing

A newspaper makes up its socks page from a number of third party suppliers: datastream ICV/TOPIC terminal, the internet (web grabbing) etc all of which can be uploaded into a Fip Stats database for extraction as full pages. We have also added a web mechanism to update manually a number of tables. These may be partially made up of automated material, so the user may be presented with a partially made table, and just fill in the gaps …. or they may be new data that is entered every day.

Web grabbing

Grabbing, routing and delivering either to w4 or to a third party CMS. In one case power station data is gathered and collated into a single page of power station stats – replacing a long and time consuming job with a single at-a-glance page.

Page production

Generation of racing and prices pages

Classified Advertising page or part page production in conjuction with MediaPlanner