This book is not about the minutia of RSS and Atom programming. It's about doing cool stuff with syndication feeds-making the technology give you exactly what you want the way you want. It's about building a feed aggregator and routing feeds to your e-mail or iPod, producing and hosting feeds, filtering, sifting, and blending them, and much more. Tan-talizing loose ends beg you to create more hacks the author hasn't thought up yet. Because if you can't have fun with the technology, what's the point?

A sampler platter of things you'll learn to do

• Build a simple feed aggregator



• Add feeds to your buddy list



• Tune into rich media feeds with BitTorrent



• Monitor system logs and events with feeds



• Scrape feeds from old-fashioned Web sites



• Reroute mailing lists into your aggregator



• Distill popular links from blogs



• Republish feed headlines on your Web site



• Extend feeds using calendar events and microformats