Often our work involves the creation or integration of content syndication systems: publishing text/images/etc. from one source in (an)other place(s). The benefits are pretty clear: managing content - news headlines, say - in one place sure beats managing content in several places; coordinating the management of content on two sites, especially when it is content you want to keep consistent, introduces extra time, extra headaches, and extra cost.
A quick example: the Near Westside Initiative, a collaborative community effort which combines multiple projects aimed at rebuilding the residential and commercial vibrancy of this Syracuse neighborhood, publishes information about houses for sale (at very attractive prices) in the neighborhood. The information about the houses - price, details, photos - comes from Home HeadQuarters, a not-for-profit organization committed to creating housing and related opportunities that improve the lives of underserved Central and Upstate New York people and revitalize the communities in which they live.
Originally, Home HeadQuarters and the Near Westside Initiative put up duplicate content on their respective websites: staff from both organizations would email details back and forth, and each would publish to their sites. Of course, maintaining consistent information became a challenge: changes would be temporarily out of sync, and the effort to publish the same data required twice (at least) the effort that should have been needed.
The solution: syndication. Using PHP’s cURL library, we built a system by which the properties page on the Near Westside Initiative site automatically populates details on the properties for sale from the corresponding page on the Home HeadQuarters site. The properties information remains current on both sites and only duplicate effort/time/cost is removed.
Another area in which often use syndication is blog posts. Often, publishing links to the most-recent posts from a blog related to a given site offers requires that the posts be authored in the blog, then duplicated on the main site itself, again requiring extra effort, time, and cost. On C&S Companies’ Fiddlehead site and on the 40 Below site, we programmatically consume RSS feeds to automatically display the top few blog posts; this eliminates duplicate effort, enhances the connection between the sites and their respective blogs, and presents site visitors with a wider offering of relevant content.