| Syndication | 2002-02-11 14:15 4 comments |
 by Flemming FunchMost of the weekend I was working on syndication features for the news logs. It is not fully ready to go for anything other than the news that show on the ncn public home page, but since it is probably a new idea to many, I'll better start explaining some of the ideas. The thing is that there are simple standards that are very useful for creating news feeds that can be picked up elsewhere on the net. Specifically, there's a standard that Nescape originally developed to create "channels", which is called RSS (Rich Site Summary). What it particularly is useful for is allowing sites with newslogs, weblogs, blogs, or anything like it, or regular news sites, to provide a list of the 10 most recent items they have. That forms a channel. That channel can be picked up by special aggregator sites, which gather news from many different sources, or it can picked up by programs that one can run on one's desktop, or another site can pick up the most recent items from a news site, and use that as a dynamic component of their own site. As an example of the latter possibility, look at this box which could appear on other sites, and which would always show the 10 most recent postings on the public NCN news log. If one clicks on any of them, one goes to the NCN site to read them. As a glimpse into how many news channels are out there, look at a site like weblogs.com. Most of what you see there are links into programs similar to this news log. As an example of a news aggregator, look at O'Reilly's Meerkat service. That's for technical stuff, but could set up with any kind of focus. It pulls in news from many different sources, like our combined news log, but in this case it is from many different servers, running many different kinds of programs. As to programs you can run on your desktop, check out this list. I'm trying out FeedReader, which works very nicely.You can customize it with any channels you want, like the NCN news, and it will keep updating itself with the latest postings. Anyway, my plan is that any public news log can be syndicated in the same way, if the owner wishes it. And I'll probaly also make a simple aggregator, which can pull in news channels from other places. For anybody with a website, who's technically inclined, you can check out this page on how specifically to syndicate the NCN news. |