Building "Blortals" with Blogs, RSS feeds, XSL Transforms and Dreamweaver

[mandy]

For the past month or so, I've been busy working deep under the hood here at eWEEK to pull together the worlds of lightweight content management (or, in other words, weblogs) and "enterprise" content management (as in the software guts that drive eWEEK.com) to create a new set of hybrid sites that my colleague Mary Jo Foley jokingly christened "blortals". They combine the interactive, personal approach of blogs with the stream of news, analysis, opinion and product reviews related to a particular topic from eWEEK and other Ziff publications. And they're put together almost entirely with RSS and XML Style Language (XSL).

While XML-based client-side browser magic like  AJAX is all the rage right now, sometimes simple server-side XML magic is better--especially when you're dealing with aggregating content from multiple sources, and you want your page to load somewhat faster than continental drift.  Besides, syndication formats aren't just for clients anymore--as the number of applications and services that produce RSS and Atom feeds grow exponentially, the XML syndication formats can provide a quick and easy way to integrate related content from disparate sources.  Call it "Loosely-coupled content management."

full article: http://blog.eweek.com/blogs/buzzword-com.../4784.aspx