LongIsland-NY.com is a primary example of a Media Web Site. Unlike MichaelAStein.com and Archangel-Media.com, LongIsland-NY.com is currently built as a news site from Commercial Themes and extensive plugin use. The site is approved for Google Adsense, and I use Google Analytics, and Google Search Console to track the engagement on it. In addition, it pulls selected RSS feeds from other sites, and auto publishes it’s own content. I also use Social Pilot and generated some custom feeds. LongIsland-NY.com is used as an engine that publishes tech articles to my LinkedIn profile. In addition it publishes a feed to X (Twitter) @LongIslandNYcom, and FaceBook LongIsland-NY.com. While there is very little custom programming on the site, it is a workhorse that Posts to Social Media, sends E-Mail Newsletters, and even Text Message alerts to subscribed residents about Traffic, Police, and Weather related points of notice, using my custom plugin, ‘Tonto’ which uses Twilio to maintain and send Text Message Campaigns.
LongIsland-NY.com features local and national news, commentary and is Sponsored by Local Veterans.
Theme
For this particular site I used a commercial theme that I had used on other sites. MH Magazine – by MH Themes. I find this Theme works very well as a Newsletter, but it is a bit clunky and out-dated on the back end. This particular theme was designed before Gutenberg, and is heavily PHP driven. The Home page relies on positioning of Widgets on various page areas, and is still designed in the Widget area of wordpress, which has been largely phased out with the advent of Full Site Editing. Fortunately, it comes with a lot of very useful widgets. It is still maintained and updated, so it’s much better than the version I first used in 2016, but in truth, it’s time for a major overhaul.
Most of the magic on this Website lies with how it communicates and syndicates News from and across multiple platforms.