Honestly, this isn't painful, but...

Because CityTools news and classified networks need to get feeds from your editorial and/or classified front end systems, your IT staff will typically have to be slightly involved.

In many cases, if you're already shipping files to outside classified sites (cars.com, Classified Ventues, etc.) getting ads to us will require no additional work. In our experience, the time required from your IT staff could be as much as two hours, though, for the one-time setup.

After that, all the processes are automated and, provided you don't decide to make changes, things simply run without additional time required. As new publishers join the networks you belong to, you aren't required to do anything additional. You just benefit from additional content if it's a news network or give your advertisers greater reach if it's a classified network.

However, many people aren't sure they're asking the right questions of their IT staffs. So to simplify the process, we've included a sample memo. If the answer is yes to most of the questions below, you're good to go!

The memo -- edit it as you like!

IT Staff,

We're interested in trying a service from a company called CityTools that allows us to share news and classifieds with other publishers of our choosing.

With that in mind, we have a couple of questions that need to be answered:

• Can you export files from our editorial and/or classified system as XML or CSV or Morris Classified formats? (Clean RDF works too if it can be parsed as XML)
• Are we already doing an export like this for either our web team or to ship to other classified aggregators? (This can be the easiest option of all! Just send CityTools a copy of the file our web team gets.)
• If we can export files in those formats, are the results in a single file or many indidual files? If it's in individual files, can we zip (or tar and gzip) them up into a single file? (This one isn't absolutely essential, it's a matter of convenience)
• Can you automate exporting the files and zipping them up?
• Can you automate -- using a program called curl, that is freely available and supports nearly all platforms -- uploading these files over the internet?
• Do we have a clearly identified category field in our classifieds and news feeds?
• If we're not able to export files as XML, CSV or Morris formats, can we export files in any kind of structured ASCII? If so, can you make a copy of a file that the team at CityTools can look at? (They might be able to build a special parser for it.)
• Can we import files in XML or CSV into our classified or editorial front ends? (This matters if you decide to print the content, if not, all you need to worry about is whether you can pull these files into the front end of your web content management system. Typically, if your web front end is a database driven system, pulling in the additional content is dead simple.)

If you need to contact us further, please feel free to e-mail us at support@citytools.net