A web-based news aggregation strategy is simple if the solution is Drupal, the solution I chose for both my personal and corporate websites. There may be other super-easy solutions you may want to chose, but the solutions here are simple in Drupal. There are two of them: News Aggregator and Leech, one built-in module and the other a simple download; one offers a simple news aggregation solution, the other able to completely clone the content of one or more remote sites. Seriously.
Drupal is no longer as difficult to install or maintain with the advent of Drupal 5.1. as it was in the past. Drupal comes with a perfectly serviceable RSS and ATOM feed aggregator in 5.1. The News Aggregator is a module built-in to the latest version of Drupal, 5.1. The other tool, Leech, is a free, Open Source, solution that can be downloaded from the Internet and easily installed into Drupal.
Each solution does different things, and so I will describe each solution a little bit to give you a better understanding of the available solutions to you for aggregating news and articles from other blogs, other websites, and other news organizations via their RSS and ATOM feeds. Both solutions are free and powerful, although leech is much more sophisticated and has many more bells and whistles.
Drupal News Aggregator
“Drupal is more than comfortable in the role of news aggregator. The aggregator module, packed with Drupal by default in current versions, can be used to grab from feeds all over the Web and share them with your visitors in an automated fashion. These feeds can be organized by keywords you assign, grouped by their source, or can even be displayed as chronological entries, allowing you to create your own digital newspaper of sorts,” says Chris Pirillo, the Lockergnome.
The Drupal News Aggregator is a powerful on-site RSS news reader that can gather fresh content from news sites and weblogs around the web and make it available from your site. Users can view the latest news chronologically in the main news aggregator display or by source. You can add, edit, and delete feeds and choose how often to check each individual feed for updated news. You can also tag individual feeds with categories, offering selective grouping of some feeds into separate displays. Listings of the latest news for individual sources or categorized sources can be enabled as blocks for display in the sidebar through the block administration page. Drupal also provides a machine-readable OPML file of all of your subscribed feeds.
Drupal Leech
Drupal Leech is a module for cloning articles from other news magazines, newspapers, websites and blogs via their RSS or ATOM feeds onto a Drupal site. Items aggregated from a feed can be turned into any type of content: articles, books, blog entries, and pages. Likewise, feeds themselves can be represented as any type of content. Leech integrates with Organic Groups (a type of Drupal social network): feed items inherit their feed’s group settings. When it comes to tags, labels and categories, the Leech Yahoo term extraction web service is a free tool offered by Yahoo! that will automatically read the content of the articles, and ascribe tags to the imported, cloned, article.
Which One to Choose?
Drupal News Aggregator is the simplest, most integrated tool, if the goal is to provide “other news you may enjoy,” which is what aggregation generally is.
What is an Aggregator?
An aggregator or news aggregator or feed reader is a client software that uses web feed to retrieve syndicated web content such as blogs, podcasts, vlogs, and mainstream mass media websites, or in the case of a search aggregator, a customized set of search results. Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or “personal newspaper.” Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update. The content is sometimes described as being “pulled” to the site, as opposed to “pushed,” as with email or IM.
A tool like Leech is oftentimes used to port an old blog over to Drupal. The Leech engine can easily “copy” or “clone” an entire blog or website. It can absorb entire articles that can be then represented as “yours,” although it doesn’t need to be rendered this way — and probably shouldn’t, unless you have an agreement or are aggregating your own content from several of your own feeds.
If and when content is added to the remote site, the content will be duplicated, if possible (only if the source RSS feed offers “full text” content), to your site.
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