EzineArticles.com is a site that offers article marketing to writers and content to publishers. Article marketing is the act of promoting your own websites by writing giveaway articles that other publishers then republish. So there are three parties, each with their own agenda:

1. Writers - Writers want to promote their web businesses, hoping to generate web traffic back to their website(s). This is done via the live hyperlink at the end of an article.
2. EzineArticles - EzineArticles used to charge for the service, but now they are running a trial with Google Adsense and Chitika advertising. Owner Christopher Knight has shown many times that he likes to help both writers and publishers, but of course it's also a business for him.
3. Publishers - Publishers want content, which draws readers, which presumably generates revenue in many forms.

The interesting aspect of this model is that all of the authors are also publishers, whereas many of the publishers are not. Regardless, everyone has their own goal, and these types of sites are so popular that new ones are springing up everyday.

There are numerous benefits to all parties with a site like EzineArticles. As a result, it behooves both publishers and authors to track authors. The reason authors would do so is to see what the top competing authors are writing about.

So how does someone traffic new article submissions from an author? RSS feeds, of course. EzineArticles has just released a new feature:

Without much fanfare, we released a monster size feature that gives every single one of our 19,794 authors their own unique RSS feed.

Presumably, if you are tracking, say, 10 or 20 authors, you would set up a "EzineArticles" folder in your RSS reader to hold the corresponding 10 or 20 RSS feeds. You could, of course, further subdivide the folder into categories by article topic.

Now no doubt there are sites that offer even more custom feeds than EzineArticles (such as MyYahoo or a newspaper), but nearly 20,000 feeds is a massive undertaking. I haven't spoken to Chris Knight about how they generated so many feeds, or whether they use a service. But theoretically speaking, it's not that difficult. Here's a simple algorithm:

1. For each author, generate a unique code that will be added to a base URL to form a unique dynamic URL. This URL will identify an author's feed.
2. Store the author feed URL in the author database.
3. When a request for an author feed is made, extract the unique code portion and match it against the database to determine the author.
4. For each new article for this author, retrieve partial- or full-text information and format it into RSS 2.0 XML (eXtensible Markup Language).
5. Serve up the resulting RSS/ XML code to the requesting agent (browser, standalone RSS reader, or some other piece of software).

That's it. At some later date, a piece of sample PHP and mySQL code will be posted at http://www.webfeedmail.com/journal. I'll announce it on this weblog.

Links/ Sources: EzineArticles.com.

(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

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