Living Stories are a new format for presenting and consuming online news. The basic idea of a living story is to combine all of the news coverage on a running story on a single page. Every day, instead of writing a new article on the story that sits at a new URL and contains some new developments and some old background, a living story resides at a permanent URL, that is updated regularly with new developments. This makes it easier for readers to get the latest updates on the stories that interest them, as well as to review deeper background materials that are relevant for a story's context.

To see Living Stories in action, go to http://livingstories.googlelabs.com and click on one of the listed stories. These stories were created for a Labs experiment that ran from Dec 2009 - Feb 2010 by a partnership between Google, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. This open source package lets you create similar living stories on your own website.

Read more in the blog post announcing the open source launch of Living Stories.

Documentation

The Living Story Format

• Principles and best practices
• Components of a living story page
• Data structure and content types

Get started with the code

• Building and running the application
• Service dependencies
• Package structure
• Running outside AppEngine

Entering content

• How to use the content manager

Customize your story pages

• Changing the look and feel
• Guide to CSS styles
• Internationalization

Publishing with Wordpress New!

• Install and use the Living Stories Wordpress plugin

License Information

The Living Stories code is available under the Apache 2.0 license. You can view information about the other libraries used in this code and their license information here.

Help

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