Geeklog Forums

What is Content Syndication? What does it do? What does adding a new feed do?

Please can someone answer the three questions above...

Start with the FAQ: Content syndication

And if "RSS feed" doesn't ring a bell, see Wikipedia for more information ...

bye, Dirk

By changing the name and description via my admin control panel from "Geeklog Site" and "Another Niftly Geeklog Site" it will still work?

Sure, that's why they're editable ...

bye, Dirk

Good - coz I changed them!!!

I dont really understand these files - Does adding a new feed allow me to control the content of another website owned by myself via the one site?

Content Syndication is a two fold operation in geeklog.

1) Making your own content feeds available
and
2) Reading other's content into your site.

Firstly, it's a fairly standard thing these days to make a Content Syndication feed available in RSS (or another appropriate format such as ATOM, RDF or other versions of RSS). This allows anyone who can get at your RSS feed to re-publish the information you provide on their site. It is within your control to include only headlines, headlines and a bit of the text as a teaser or the full article. Other sites may then republish the headlines as a link to the full article on your site. Or republish the full article if you have made that available.

More importantly, it allows people using content aggregators to surf the internet to "subscribe" to your feeds and be notified as new content arrives for reading.

You really ought to read the wikipedia article that Dirk linked. It explains this quite well.

Adding new feeds allows you to offer more choice to potential subscribers. I publish a feed in each of the popular formats covering all article categories, but you could easily publish each category of article in it's own feed of a single type to allow people only interested in one thing to monitor that one thing.

2) Reading other's content into your site is the exact opposite. You read a feed from someone elses site and publish the headlines in a block on that site to allow people to see that other site has stuff they want to go and see.

For example, my friend Doug reads my ATOM feed and republishes the headlines on his site, so people visiting his site can visit my site, as our sites are similar. I republish Doug's RSS feed on my site to return the favour.

o.k Thanks.