site news archive - content syndication
12th February 2005 - 14:25
It's official, I'm in love with content syndication. While syndication is a nice geek word, it doesn't tell most people that see it what it actually means. Basically it just means pulling information in from a number of different places and displaying it in one. The most common way this is now done online is with RSS or Atom feeds.
I use RSS feeds for both keeping up to date with other sites, and adding additional content to this site. For keeping up with sites I use the Sage news aggregator firefox extension. RSS feeds are a nice way of keeping up with a lot of information, I'm currently subscribed to 129 feeds. There's no way I would be able to track that many sites if I had to go and manually look at each one. The one disadvantage is any sites that aren't providing a feed get a bit left out now, as I forget to check them. I think I'm addicted.
Now onto how I'm using syndication to add features to this site. The first feature that appeared, that I've mentioned before is the recent music bar on the right. This is made using the RSS feed from my Audioscrobbler profile.
Following on from that, I had seen links from quite a lot of pages linking to the del.icio.us social bookmark manager. I'd been and looked at the page a few times, but never really "got" it. It's not particlarly clear on a first look what the site is. I'll be doing a separate post with more details about del.icio.us. What del.icio.us is providing is the latest links bar over on the right, my wishlist and the "sites to read" on the todo page.
The latest thing I've added is the todo list itself, which can be found on the todo page. This service is provided by tadalist.
One of the reasons for the sudden surge in my usage of features like this is my discovery of the fantastic MagpieRSS php library. It's an excellent library, that gives you an easy way to retrieve RSS and Atom feeds from elsewhere, does the parsing for you, and provides a nice cache system. Overall it's saved me a lot of work from doing it manually, and does it better than I ever would have. Highly recommended.
One last note, this is the first post I've written using Markdown. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for people like me, it saves most of the tedium of manually inserting HTML into articles like this one. I've not yet integrated it with my own interface on the site, as you can see on my todo list. When I do combine it into ths site I'll be using the PHP-Markdown port. This was written using the PHP Markdown Dingus then copied and pasted. Again, highly recommended.