Now that I understand what the RDF in RSS is, I’m ready to move up to RSS 1.0. I’m using Blosxom which generates RSS 0.91 by default. Flushed with a previous success using XSLT, I thought I’d use that technology again to generate 1.0 from 0.91.

Luckily, Eric van der Vlist has some XSLT stylesheets over at 4XT to do exactly that. This is the perfect opportunity for me to (a) learn more about XSLT by studying his stylesheets, and (b) to reflect upon the loosely connected nature of the web by employing the W3C’s XSLT Service and pointing directly to Eric’s 0.91-to-1.0 stylesheet and my RSS 0.91 source, in a URI recipe similar to the earlier sidebar experiment.

This link is the URI that will automagically return an RSS 1.0 of my weblog. Hurrah! However, so as not to abuse the transformation service, I’m cacheing the result and making my RSS 1.0 feed ‘static’, like this (split up a bit for easier reading):

/usr/bin/wget -qO /tmp/qmacro.rss10
	'http://www.w3.org/2000/06/webdata/xslt
	?xslfile=http%3A%2F%2F4xt.org%2Fdownloads%2Frss%2Frss091-to-10.xsl
	&xmlfile=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pipetree.com%2Fqmacro%2Fxml&transform=Submit'
	&& mv /tmp/qmacro.rss10 ~dj/public_html/

This is another example of the flexible nature of the shell (my favourite IDE) and programs designed and written for it. The wonderful wget program returns true if the retrieval of a resource was successful, otherwise false. I can then use the && to only overwrite the current static rendering if we’ve successfully got a fresh transform result.

I arrange for this incantation to be made once an hour, and can announce that my RSS 1.0 feed is available here: http://www.pipetree.com/~dj/qmacro.rss10