I've not really given much though to how RSS may be used to deliver course materials, but any delivery mechanism should provide students with a printable version if the material isn't too online interactive for print.
So when I stumbled across rss2pdf.org, another piece of the jigsaw appeared...
Specifically, here's a service that does exactly what is says on the box. And what this means is the ability to effortlessly publish blog postings (for example) in a printable, paginated format, with branding if required, and no webpage navigational clutter. (For an example, here's a PDF of this blog).
At the current time, there don't appear to be any working/reliableWiki2PDF converters on the web, but I'm sure they won't be long in coming...
So - why's it interesting. Well, as XML production routes open up, it means the potential for a wide variety of authoring environments feeding in to production processes that feed off XML. And using blogs to source print material may be attractive for a rapid publishing model.
The bottleneck, of course, is getting incoming XML into a format that the production process likes, which means that the incoming XML should ideally be capable of marking up documents at least as richly as the desired production format (if that richness is called for, of course).
Just by the by, it would be useful if blogging environments started publishing RSS versions of each individual post, e.g. on the permalink page for a post, as well as the most recent N stories feed, so that users could just take away individual stories as a PDF...
PS A few new bookmarklets for the RSS2PDF service have just crossed my radar (you can find them here). They include RSS2PDF (with or without images) for a displayed raw RSS page, as well as a pair of autodiscovery RSS2PDF bookmarklets (again, one for pages with images, one for pages without).
Posted by ajh59 at August 9, 2005 03:17 PM