RSS Meets PDF - Ah, The Possibilities
Permenant Link To: RSS Meets PDF - Ah, The Possibilities
One of the many great aspects about RSS is its versatility.
Due to its universal format, a single RSS-based article can easily be used/displayed:
- In a newsreader, such as Pluck
- On your My Yahoo page
- In your favorite instant messenger
- On your cellphone
- On other Websites around the world (through syndication)
And now, Adobe has built RSS capabilities into its Acrobat software.
I'll be the first to tell you that Acrobat's built-in ability to display RSS feeds is not really that exciting. Dedicated newsreaders, such as Pluck, are a lot more powerful.
What is unique about Acrobat's implementation is the fact that it allows you to instantly convert the content of an RSS feed into a PDF!
Why is that such a big deal?
Well, for one thing, you can now read your favorite RSS feeds offline - just generate a PDF. A better use however, in my opinion, is for you to use this feature to produce PDFs from your own content, which you can make available for free, or as a product.
Follow me here.
In my upcoming ebook RSS Domination: Power-Publisher's Edition, I talk about the concept of using a blog/rss in order to create a full-blown ebook product.
The basics are that you take a subject, put together a list of topics, start a free blog at Blogger, and then once-a-day, discipline yourself to write at least one entry into your blog (c'mon, you can write at least one entry a day). If you maintain your discipline, within a month you could have a pretty well-rounded product that you could make available for sale.
The trick is getting your blog's content into ebook-form. There are services that do this (which I discuss in the ebook), but if you own Acrobat, it appears you'll have the tools for doing this right out of the box!
I'll be investigating this feature more.
If you're interested in learning more about it, here's a nice tutorial by one of Adobe's engineers.
On 1:26 PM, Greg said:
Interesting idea, Derek. My only questions would regard formatting. I already have a "convert to pdf" button on IE - so if I run my feed through something like bloglines I can do a pdf of it, but that's sans formatting and graphics. For pure text, it's not a bad idea, but generally I have some prettifying material and layouts. In general, creating a pdf from a web page works somewhat better in that regard.
BTW, I still owe you the review of RSS Domination - the first volume is very nice, and I promise, I will post a review as soon as I can.
Posting Guidelines - Please Follow The Rules!
I am happy to provide this commenting feature to enable discussion of the articles posted. In fact, I appreciate and encourage you to participate.
Like everything else I put my name on, I hold this site to a very high standard. What you say in your comments reflect indirectly on me. Therefore, please be aware of the following guidelines/rules for posting your thoughts.
After familiarizing yourself, please post away! :)
