Ian kindly went to Borders yesterday and got me a copy of Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom by Ben Hammersley. As with the other O'Reilly Media published books that I keep on hand for reference, it is a well written book. It introduces the technologies by discussing the history and methods in creating the various standards. Then it shows numerous ways on how to use feeds both as a syndicator and as a subscriber.

As I was telling Ian last night, I don't think I would have ended up doing web production if we hadn't met. I think I would have been put off by the computers. Programming was something my brother did as a kid, not me. Sixteen years ago I couldn't have imagined relaxing after dinner to read a technical book! But he has always been very encouraging and never doubted me when I said I could something.

While I'm reading the book, I am also retooling what's currently under the hood here at Puss Reboots. I've cleaned up a bunch of old latent code and I will be doing some minor but important changes to how I handle my blogs (specifically my archives). Current blog archives will not be affected by these changes and frankly other than the final switching on of the feed, regular visitors should see no changes to the site. ( )

Quite heavy on the history of RSS as a technology rather than the actual using of it. Otherwise good but I have to admit I've sort of given up on this for now. I will return to it though and write a proper review. ( )