The Aggravations of Aggregation

摘要

"Feed me! Feed me!" That's the cry of many of your visitors, particularly those trying to find nutritional content despite junk-info overload. You can probably help by taking advantage of emerging content delivery options, but be sure to take into account some of the aggravations you may encounter when developing your informational menu. Take, for example, RSS—Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication or whatever you'd Eke to call it. (ATOM is another similar function you may also have run into.) I'm not going to get into the technicalities of setting up RSS feeds or which version will suit your needs; they all boil down to a novel form of syndication—one in which you won't always know where you're being picked up and probably won't be able to charge for your content. Whatever version you choose to use, you'll probably offer links on your Web site, which may take the form of a little orange RSS or XML, a hotlink saving "Syndicate XML" or "Atom Feed." Each icon or link offers up a feed—somewhere that pieces of content appear with time and date stamps, so that they can be harvested by aggregators. You may want to use subject-specific feeds or feeds for specific services within your site and offer headline, summary, or full-text feeds.