By chrisd on

I'm looking to offer some books on a Drupal site.

Anyone knows a good place to find downloadable, royalty free, XML books.

Thanks,
Christophe

Comments

Dan McDermott’s picture

Dan McDermott commented

i found several sources by searching for "free on-line books" and "free online books" in google and yahoo

good luck

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Warren County, Virginia News & Networking: http://warrencountyreport.com

chrisd’s picture

chrisd commented

Did you ever successfully get one of those free books and import it into Drupal ?

Just curious,
Christophe

Dan McDermott’s picture

Dan McDermott commented

no i was just looking into it since i saw your post.
im sure you could find some that you could import with some copying and pasting.
what are you after? if you're just looking for content that attracts users, try rss feeds. http://syndic8.com is a great source. i have a bunch on my site and they are a draw.

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Warren County, Virginia News & Networking: http://warrencountyreport.com

chrisd’s picture

chrisd commented

Thanks for the link.

I'm just looking for sources of dynamic content.
How to you find the good versus the bad at: http://www.syndic8.com

php: 14213 feeds!

or do you use syndic8 for specialised topics (i.e. with less feeds), so you can check then all "by hand" first ?



Tech. articles with a WAMP+IIS+Drupal focus:
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Dan McDermott’s picture

Dan McDermott commented

here are the 200 most popular rss feeds based on subscriptions on syndic8.com: http://www.syndic8.com/boxpage.php?Box=PopularFeeds&N=200

that link is from the bottom left of their site.

some of my most popular feeds are...

cool tools: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/index.xml

boing boing: http://feeds.feedburner.com/boingboing/iBag

also the yahoo news feeds (especially "most viewed news") are terrific: http://news.yahoo.rss

and you can create your own feed from that same page. for example since i live in warren county i have created my own yahoo rss feed for the term "warren county" and restricted it to newspapers in virginia.

to see how i have implemented the taxonomy, go here and note how the feeds are categorized on my navigational menu on the left: http://warrencountyreport.com/?q=taxonomy_menu/6

P.S. Totally off topic, but if you have any idea how to edit the goofy theme to show a banner on the top right of the site i would appreciate it. ive wrestled with that for a couple of months.
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Warren County, Virginia News & Networking: http://warrencountyreport.com

chrisd’s picture

chrisd commented

I had noticed your site in the past already. It's one of the better looking ones.

Thanks for the nuggets about RSS. You got indeed some of the coolest RSS feeds. If I wasn't so busy I would still be reading your site ;-)

I just got into Drupal (about 1 month ago) and I started directly with 4.7Beta. We are still missing a lot of the 4.6 modules.
Looks like you have the RSS_import_into_node module...very cool.
It's still not avail on 4.7B4.

Sorry for not being able to give you instructions for the banner in the top right. I'm working about 10 different things in parallel right now (most in a newbie capacity).

For working the GUI of Drupal sites my setup is:
FireFox
Abode GoLive works good with css.
But most importantly this Firefox plugin:
http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/
a real nugget to work with css...

Cheers,
Christophe D



Tech. articles with a WAMP+IIS+Drupal focus:
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Dan McDermott’s picture

Dan McDermott commented

if you have 4.7 then you wouldn't have to edit the theme anyway since you can put a block anywhere. i'm terrified to switch though.

i wish i knew more (translation: "any" lol) php and css so i could be more helpful bringing the modules up to date to handle 4.7

since i'm a newbie as well i have to wait until 4.7 is rock solid and the modules i use will work. or i have to wait until i have the skills to fix the little issues that will crop up. i will probably try 4.7 on a new site that isn't marketed so i can play with it. im very excited about the innovations and frustrated that i can't help with it yet but im going to try to get into php. i was a database and computer game programmer in the past so if i can learn what makes drupal work i think ill be able to contribute. that would make me feel a lot better since i love the system and want to give something back. for now i help with configuration and other non-code stuff when i can.

actually i am using aggregator2 which will import feeds directly into nodes. that was a huge step in being able to selectively choose feeds of interest to my users and then put them into a menu structure ( http://warrencountyreport.com/?q=taxonomy_menu/6 ) so users can wade through the content and find what they want.

another use for this is for sites selling advertising. for example, if you have a nursery that wants to advertise, you could create a content section called gardening and aggregate some good gardening feeds into that category. then create a page with an ad for the nursery and sticky it to the top of the list so each time a user goes to that section he will see the relevant ad for the nursery. newspapers do this as well. they'll have a special bridal pullout and solicit ads from caterers, djs, florists, etc.

ill check out that link. thanks!

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Warren County, Virginia News & Networking: http://warrencountyreport.com