XplanaZine

Lots of people are blogging - and lots of those blogs have syndication features. But what is that all about? I would guess that it is still only a small minority of my friends and colleagues who are taking advantage of syndication. So, in the same way that I needed somebody to tell me about being able to have my Google in Latin, I’m going to write up a quick explanation here of what it means to have your web content available to you in an “aggregator” via syndication. Apologies to everybody for whom this is old hat - but remember the first time you learned what a “browser” did? There’s a first time for everything…
So, what is an aggregator? An aggregator is a program that goes and checks information sources (blogs, websites) and identifies new information in those sources. These sources are your “subscriptions.” Each time the aggregator checks your subscriptions, it reports back to you on any new content that is available. The information that is reported back to you is a “feed”. You can “subscribe” to any information source that offers an information “feed.”
There are all kinds of things you can subscribe to now - there are feeds from major news sources (e.g., New York Times), or feeds from all kinds of websites (like here at XPLANA), or feeds from individual blogs (all the blogs at LiveJournal have syndication options, like my Carmenta blog). A great way to get a sense of who is subscribing to what is to look at the many sources being syndicated at Blogging Headline News. Another way to see what people are reading is to check out the “Top 100″ subscriptions in the Radio Userland community.
And who or what is Radio Userland? Radio Userland is a piece of software that you can use for both blogging and as an aggregator. It’s a great buy at just $39.95 (which currently includes one year of blog hosting, in addition to the software); here’s a screenshot of what the Radio Userland news aggregator looks like.
But if you’re not sure you want to buy anything, do it for free. There are lots of free news aggregators out there you can use - I’ll quickly run through the features of Syndirella here, just because it is the news aggregator that my friend Rob first introduced me too (plus I love that it is developed in Russia by Dmitry Jemerov! let’s get global!). Syndirella is a Windows application, and you may need to install the .NET framework, which you can quickly do using the Windows Update feature - note that the .NET framework is not a “Critical Updates and Service Packs” item, but something that will show up in the Windows category, right up near the top of the list.
After you’ve got Windows .NET, then installing and running Syndirella is a piece of cake. Just go to the download link (current version 0.9b), unzip the zipped file, and you are in business. Just click on the red Syndirella icon and you’re in business.
The first thing you will want to do is add some subscriptions. To do that, find the “feed” link for something you want to syndicate. This is often indicated by a little XML icon: . The “feed” link is a link just like any other link - here’s the XPLANA Articles feed link, which comes in two varieties. You can get the entire text of the new articles delivered to your aggregator with this link: http://www.xplana.com/rss.php?feed=articles. Or you can get just the opening lines of the article in plain text format: http://www.xplana.com/rss.php?feed=articles&format=plain. Don’t worry about the nasty gobbledy-gook that you see if you click on these links - all you need to do is “copy” the link and “paste” it into your syndicator. Here’s what the “add a subscription” box looks like in Syndirella:

After you have added a “feed”, it will appear in your subscriptions list in the left-hand pane of Syndirella:

As you click on each of the subscription feeds, a list of the headlines will appear in the upper right-hand pane, and the contents of the feed will appear in the lower right-hand pane. In the screenshot, you see a feed from the New York Times, which consists of a brief description of the article, and a link that you can click for the full article. Other types of feeds supply the full article in the aggregator pane, as you can see in this screenshot:

Yet even when you get the complete article in HTML-format, with images and text formatting and so on, it is still very different from reading the article in its original website, where it would have been surrounded by navigation and other design features. In some cases, this is a blissful effect: no popup ads! no annoying color palettes! But you also lose the richness of viewing the article in its original website. So, if you want, just hit Control-H to view the article in its original website - the choice is yours!
To update your sites, use F5 (or select Subscriptions - Update All Feeds). This will go through all your subscriptions, looking for new content, and highlighting in bold any subscriptions that have new articles you have not looked at (just like new email in your email inbox). Syndirella actually uses a little email envelope icon to help you move from one unread article to the next (or you can just hit the space-bar).

As you can tell from this menu list, Syndirella is a very bare-bones piece of software. No special features - but it takes about 90 seconds to learn how to use the whole thing! That’s an unusual software experience these days…
Syndirella may go away - read more about what Dmitry Jemerov says about that at his weblog. But if you have five minutes, right now, to download and install a news aggregator, just as an experiment, Syndirella is a fun and easy way to get started.
Meanwhile, Dmitry Jemerov suggests we take a look at the great features of Luke Hutteman’s Sharpreader… I like Syndirella and would feel a bit sad to switch, but for my next article here I’ll take a look at Sharpreader.
Because everybody needs a free aggregator…
What are the other options out there people are using? Curious to know (discuss button is up at the top of the page…)