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.
