ContentSyndicationWith

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Mini Review of Content Syndication with RSS

 By Ben Hammersley
 http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/consynrss/index.html
 193 pages (in body)

I had a read through it of this book and in summary, it is a good introduction to the RSS technologies that I'd recommend if people are looking to get up-to-speed with RSS.

A substantial part of the book is on RDF, RSS 1.0 and modules (60+ pages) with a readable and correct description of the technology, what it is for and it's applications. It also includes an outline of how to create your own RSS 1.0 module and outlines how and why to reuse terms.

It does discuss the non-RDF RSS flavours. Having recently looked at implementing these, I can tell you that they are pretty badly defined - you need a book like this and some web pages to use them since the specs have so many gaps.

The rest of the book contains an introduction to syndication, explanations of the server and client syndication aspects of RSS, publish and subscribe all with extensive examples and code.

Dave Beckett

Errata (sent to the author)

page 40

 these examples aren't xhtml friendly, not `<link ... />` etc. not a bug really

page 50/51

 the url in the rdf:about varies from `http://example.org`
 to `http://example.org/` which isn't right, a gotcha.

page 58

 (and elsewhere)
 The email form here isn't rfc822 form, since it has a `mailto` in it:
    <dc:creator>Rael Dornfest (mailto:rael@oreilly.com)</dc:creator>
 should be:
    <dc:creator>Rael Dornfest (rael@oreilly.com)</dc:creator>


page 67

 top line should be
xmlns:my="http://purl.org/m/rss/module/"
 - missing "s around the url, required for XML (different to html)

page 105

    <rdf:li rdf:resource="URI TO TAXONOMIC REFERENCE" /
 missing an end >
    <rdf:li rdf:resource="URI TO TAXONOMIC REFERENCE" />


page 106

  ditto for several of the `rdf:li` here (total 5)

page 109

  `wiki:host` isn't used as a subelement like the text says, but as
  an attribute.  I'm not familiar with mod_wiki but although this is
  correct RDF/XML, it's not  seen often in RSS 1.0.  Not sure who is
  at fault here.

page 116

 there is an extra `</g` stuck in the middle of the `<guid ...>`

page 148

 again xhtml warning about `<link ..>`