Feeds
The nooked platform holds your product data in a normalised format which can be accessed via as RSS or Atom feeds by internet based Clients.
nooked track impressions on feeds and click-throughs on feed entries (items).
Updating Feeds From Sources
nooked feeds can be set up to poll existing feeds (Sources) at scheduled intervals. All of the Sources associated with a single Collection end up getting aggregated into a single nooked feed. All nooked feeds can have zero or more Sources.
Source Formats
Currently the nooked platform can poll from Sources that are RSS or Atom format feeds. nooked will be significantly extending the source formats that we natively support. We can also add account specific source formats if you need the ability work with some legacy proprietary data formats (e.g. legacy CSV formats).
Updating Feeds Using AtomPub
All nooked feeds can be modified using the Atom Publishing Protocol. This protocol allows you to modify, create new or delete individual feed entries on an individual basis and thus significantly more efficient than any bulk update mechanism (such as polling from external feed sources).
Feed Entry Content
The nooked platform does not enforce any constraints on the content of individual feed entries (items). Feed entries can contain plain text, XHTML, XML or any other valid content type. Rich XHTML in feed entries works well if the content is to be viewed by end users as-is. However, what if the client is a small widget?
To allow clients to figure out what to display you will need to add semantics to the data in your feed entry contents. This can be done in a number of ways. The entry could contain custom XML that the clients know how to parse. A better solution that will lead to greater reuse of your data is adapt well de-facto or official industry standards for encoding semantics in your data. Two primary examples of this are Microformats and Google Data.