Compared to what we've talked about so far, the publisher is a pretty simple piece of the puzzle. It receives a list of stories, each one assigned to one or more channels, and simply posts them on the selected target, that is Xtratime.org. For this to work, we must first prepare an account on the forum for Newman. Having done that, the publisher will log in the user, open the thread where the story should be posted and simply post it, adding some vBcode formatting to the text. The image below shows what a typical news post looks like.

While Newman posts articles on Xtratime.org, which is a vBulletin forum, it could just as easily post them on any other website, it's just a matter of reading the html code sent to us from the server and submitting html forms with the correct data. I won't bore you with the details. Of course, there is always a chance that the server may drop the connection while the posting is in progress, or the connection may fail in the first place. In these cases, the publisher will report the error, but it will try to post the next story as if nothing happened.

In the event that vBulletin rejects the post for any reason, Newman tries to read this error and report it. It may be that two stories have been posted too close together (vBulletin has a limit for how often posts can occur by the same user), perhaps something else didn't go to plan. In any event, it handles these errors gracefully without crashing.

In early stages of development, I was testing Newman on a test forum I set up, which was protected with a password. Newman can use basic http authentication to access web sites in that way.

This entry is part of the series Project Newman.