Mon, 30 May 2005
RSS and Atom Feeds
Ben Hammersley, Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom, O'Reilly
This is very topical for us at Mstation as we've been working
on getting podcasts going. Podcasts depend on RSS 2.0 and its added tag
of "enclosure" to make it happen and right now we're having to manually output
rss as our server is missing a vital Perl library to make the thing happen
automagically.
Researching the whole thing has been interesting as we started with the word
"podcasting" and then dove further and further down until we got to the crucial
aspect -- enclosures. I guess if we were to mention another current buzzword that
connects with this subject, we could also say "blogs". So, this book is
extremely relevant to things a lot of people are doing. It's also relevant
to things that people are thinking of doing in this interesting world -- one
such mentioned in the book involves grabbing weather information in text
format and then converting the text to speech and issuing it as a podcast.
Pretty cool.
This book is a reasonable bible for what's happening at the moment although
in our special interest area there wasn't a mention of the vital enclosure
tag, but there is tons of other information on the specs of RSS and Atom and
generating feeds and generally mucking around with them.
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pre Dec 04 reviews are here