Cool Tools
Cool tools contains links and comments about nifty software and vaporware that strikes my fancy and interests, whatever they happen to be at the time.
Thursday, May 22, 2003

Libraries and RSS Roundup

Roy Tennant drinks the RSS kool aid in an article in this month's LJ called Feed Your Head: Keeping Up by Using RSS, and he has the [overall] same idea as Steven Cohen about highlighting Library Purchases Via RSS. Curiously, an RSS feed is not listed as one of the Fifteen Library-tested Programs and Policies to Increase Circulation of AV Materials, so let's just write it in ourselves as #16. ...

[via The Shifted Librarian, 20 May 02003]

9:37:13 AM    comment []  Google It!

4XT.org, "a site of resources for XT (a Java XSLT processor), by and for XT users, powered by XT." James Clark wrote the original XT and his site is at XT. You'll find some interesting tools on 4XT.org via the Downloads and Resources pages, including downloads for generating RSS 1.0 (the official version) with XT.
9:18:26 AM    comment []  Google It!

A copy of a handout I prepared for a presentation to government and special librarians, along with information technologists, at a provincial government office can be found in a couple of places:

Searchers' Zwiki: http://searcher.freezope.org/zwiki/blogs-rss-wikis

Ten Thousand Year Blog: http://radio.weblogs.com/0110793/stories/2003/05/21/blogsrsswikisCompiledByDavidMattison.html

Because the document was written in Microsoft Word 2000, there's a lot of extraneous HTML tagging, even with the Export to Compact HTML feature used. I keep needing to remind myself never to write something in Word that's intended for display as a Web page.

I'll likely maintain the authoritative copy on the Ten Thousand Year Blog. The Zwiki version is fully editable by anyone.

For those interested in RSS, I'd like to again point out the new myRSS.com service, along with Doug Ransom's excellent presentation on RSS, "Connecting Interested People to New Web Content With Syndication and Aggregation", http://www.weav.bc.ca/slides/weav.rss_files/v3_document.htm

Some other RSS tools Doug pointed out for generating RSS content directly from HTML or XHTML pages -- what's called scraping HTML -- are found at

  • Site Summaries in XHTML (W3C Semantic Web Development): http://www.w3.org/2000/08/w3c-synd/ (includes basic formatting instructions for your XHTML page and an example using data from the W3C Web site)
  • XHTML-to-RSS Extractor service [trial-release]: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/2000/08/hss/sw.html ("This service uses a generic webdata transformation service (an XSLT server) to convert from a dialect of XHTML to the proposed RSS 1.0 channel format. Goal: author in XHTML, syndicate in RSS.")

Doug Ransom and Ian Davis are also working on a hypertext syndication proposal that would embed RSS right into XHTML, so a document would be capable of being read as either an RSS feed or an HTML document.


8:56:08 AM    comment []  Google It!





© 2003 David Mattison
Last Update: 7/13/2003; 11:40:30 AM

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