ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming Problem - Design - Solution

5.1. Problem

Different sites use different methods of gathering news and information: Some site administrators hunt for news events and write their own articles, while others get news and articles directly from their users (a great example of this is the Add Your News link at www.aspwire.com) or they rely upon a company whose business is to gather and organize news to be sold to third-party sites. In the old days, some sites did screen-scraping, retrieving data from an external site's page and showing it on their pages with a custom appearance (of course, you must have the authorization from the external company and you must know the format they use to show the news on their pages). During the last few years we've seen an explosion in the use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a simple XML format for syndicating content, making it available to other clients. Atom is another XML-based syndication standard that was created to solve some problems of RSS—it is relatively new but already very popular. The basic idea with RSS and ATOM is for sites to provide an index of news items in the form of an XML document. A client program can fetch that XML document and provide users with a list of news items and hyperlinks that can direct them to the individual stories they are interested in. One site's XML index document is called a newsfeed. The client program is called a news aggregator (or feed reader) because it can extract newsfeeds from many sites and present them in one list, possibly ...