Saturday, November 13, 2004
Ever gone to a blog and wondered what those odd links and buttons were: "XML", "Syndicate", "newsfeed", "RSS 2.0" etc etc? Well, I'd like to share my voyage of discovery with you, as it's really rather neat!
So... what does RSS and syndication mean to blogging?
In a word? It's accessability.
Obtaining feeds from several blogs means you can keep them all together and be notified almost instantly of changes. It means you can keep up with all your favourite news sites. To authors it offers a practical way of allowing your readers to read all of their favourite feeds together, either as complete news items or as snippets. The software that allows the collecting and reading of feeds is called an aggregator. (A lot of comic strips for example, use RSS feeds). It's a very efficient way of keeping up to date with fresh content.
You can even syndicate the weather! Weather Conditions and Forecast
Not so long ago syndication/feeds was in the realm of the geeks. Those who could hand-code, or had access to webhosts running perl. Not so any more, as I found out for myself last night.
Here's my aggregator:
On the left-hand pane (1) it lists all the blogs and news sites I am subscribed to. On the right-hand pane (2) I can read one of the sites. The feeds are supplied as either snippets, or as full stories with easy links to the sites if you need to go there.
I've learnt quite a bit about syndication over the past couple of days, how to use it, how to read it. Websites that offer codes, some that aggregate, sites that offer browser plug-ins. It's all good stuff. As more and more people learn about it and as more websites offer tools to make it as easy to impliment as 'point and click', the more you will see it around. I believe it is here to stay and that can only be for the better.
Resources:
Bloglines
FeedBurner
Syndic8
BlogFeed
my.yahoo
So... what does RSS and syndication mean to blogging?
In a word? It's accessability.
Obtaining feeds from several blogs means you can keep them all together and be notified almost instantly of changes. It means you can keep up with all your favourite news sites. To authors it offers a practical way of allowing your readers to read all of their favourite feeds together, either as complete news items or as snippets. The software that allows the collecting and reading of feeds is called an aggregator. (A lot of comic strips for example, use RSS feeds). It's a very efficient way of keeping up to date with fresh content.
You can even syndicate the weather! Weather Conditions and Forecast
Not so long ago syndication/feeds was in the realm of the geeks. Those who could hand-code, or had access to webhosts running perl. Not so any more, as I found out for myself last night.
Here's my aggregator:
On the left-hand pane (1) it lists all the blogs and news sites I am subscribed to. On the right-hand pane (2) I can read one of the sites. The feeds are supplied as either snippets, or as full stories with easy links to the sites if you need to go there.
I've learnt quite a bit about syndication over the past couple of days, how to use it, how to read it. Websites that offer codes, some that aggregate, sites that offer browser plug-ins. It's all good stuff. As more and more people learn about it and as more websites offer tools to make it as easy to impliment as 'point and click', the more you will see it around. I believe it is here to stay and that can only be for the better.
Resources:
Bloglines
FeedBurner
Syndic8
BlogFeed
my.yahoo
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