Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Now if you look at these articles, especially if you're an individual or in a
small group, you're going to feel like they're serious overkill. And they prob-
ably are! But at least glance over them. If you're building a Web site for an
institution or a corporation, please look over the site planning articles care-
fully. If you're building the site yourself, it'll give you some useful guide-
lines. If you're not, it'll help you understand the goals and concerns of the
people who are building the site.
In this section, we've looked at learning HTML, but of course that's not the
only way to run your own Web site. You also have the option of learning a
sotware package that'll help you put a Web site together. For example, you
could learn Dreamweaver, or Microsot's FrontPage. So you can either learn
HTML or a sotware package—but the same “cons” of extra coding time,
maintenance, and lack of universal plug-ins will apply.
hus far in the chapter it's been all about content—how do you make the
content, where do you keep the content? hat's the place to start. But the
next step is how do you distribute your content? So let's spend a little more
time on RSS feeds.
RSS Feeds for Content Distribution
RSS feeds, as you learned earlier in this topic, are XML documents that
alert users of changes to Web sites and summaries of new content. hey
can get a lot more complicated than that—they can hold everything from
graphics to MP3 iles—but at the heart of it, RSS feeds are about providing
information updates.
Making that kind of information available is critical to you, the informa-
tion publisher; the more ways your Web site can be kept up with, the more
likely your visitors will make the efort to keep up with it, and the more
readers you'll have. So you might have a blog and a newsletter, or a wiki and
a discussion group, or a quarterly published PDF and a wiki. In addition to
all that, you should have, whenever it's available, an RSS feed.
Built-in solutions
When is it available? For blogs, all the time; all major blog sotware and ser-
vices automatically create RSS feeds for you. For wikis, some of the time.
When evaluating a wiki, look for syndication options. And be careful because
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