Tuesday 20-August-2002

If you develop your own web pages for an internet or an intranet website, then you will probably create some form of content for your pages. Content can be stories, articles, photographs or a collection of your favorite poems etc.

Unless you have a huge amount of time to devote to creating this content, then it can be difficult to make the website diverse enough to attract new visitors and to retain old ones.

Many websites legally 'borrow' the content from other websites to supplement their offerings to visitors. It could be a weekly column, current affairs, weather, sports, horoscopes, games or a daily comic. The more often the content changes, the more often visitors will return to your site.

The term for legally re-publishing content from another provider is known as syndication, you may have heard the term as it is applied to comic strips in your local newspaper.

An internet site can easily pick up one of these syndicated content feeds with only a few lines of code added to any HTML page in their website. An example of a huge range of freely available content feeds is at Freesticky, where you can find weather, news, articles, comics, games and heaps more content to add to your website.

If you want to see a quick demonstration of this in action and you are connected to the internet, create a new HTML page and add the following code between the body tags (You should see a random joke each time you load the web page in your browser):

<!-- BEGIN Sticky Jokes Code --> 
<script src="http://freefunny.com/feeds/stickyjokes.phtml"></script>
<noscript><a href="http://freefunny.com" target="_blank">To see a random joke you will need to enable Javascript on your browser.
<BR>See lots of hilarious jokes at FreeFunny.com</a>
</noscript>
<!-- END Sticky Jokes Code --> 

aspSyndicator is for the content provider/creator and allows anybody with original content the easy means to generate and maintain a syndicated content feed for other websites to pick up. So that great advice you give or the wonderful weekly article you write can now be seen all across the internet the instant you publish it to your own website without you or your subscribers having to do any extra work, and they great thing is that it spreads by itself throughout the internet.

Simply create your content how you would normally create it. Copy and paste it into the aspSyndicator Raw Content window (Include all your HTML tags for any required formatting) and with the press of a button, your raw HTML feed has been converted into a ready to go JavaScript file that your subscribers use to access your content. aspSyndicator even generates the code that you give to your users to access the Javascript file.

Syndicated Content is Spider Food !!!
One of the main advantages of creating content that you can syndicate is that you normally include your URL somewhere in the feed where other webmasters can also get the content feed. Each time a website adds your content feed to their website, not only does it give you free promotion it also increases you page ranking in the major search engines such as Google, which rates how important a page is by the number of other websites that link to it. A higher ranking in the search engines means more traffic to your website and more revenue !

A cost effective solution
whilst it does not have all the bells and whistles of the major content delivery systems on the market, the software on iContent-Delivery, such as aspSyndicator, offers simple & cost effective solutions (around US$50) to medium and small sized websites who wish to syndicate their own content either for profit or promotion.

See a demo of aspSyndicator on iContent-Delivery !
 

Copyright © 2002 Mark Wickman, All Rights Reserved.

Author Information:
Mark Wickman
stickymaster@icontent-delivery.com
http:\\www.icontent-delivery.com

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