The Cleartext Systems web site has the facility to place ‘promoted’ (I think we can thank Twitter for that term in this context) articles on a flexible timeline. These articles highlight interesting relevant technology, generate traffic for the site and click through links for the articles author.

The annotated screen grab below shows the three areas that promoted articles traverse during their time on the home page of the site. Simply they start as a ‘Latest Post’ and move down the page over a period of time.

Articles start in position one and move through to position three and then remain available in the archive. In general the timing is laid out below but popular articles may stay in position longer, and conversely articles that don’t get many view will move on more quickly.

1. Latest Post: 3 – 14 days depending on the number and frequency of views
2. Featured Articles: About 3 weeks, moving down a position at a time as the ‘Latest Article’ is changed.
3. Recent Blog Articles: 6-8 weeks

So in theory a promoted article can be on the home page for anything from a day or so to a month or so before it goes into the archive. Articles in the archive are still accessible via the link they were posted with.

If you have some interesting information or communications technology contact me about article placement.