The final Harry Potter book comes out in less than 24 hours, and while the media hype has been immense, it does not take away from the fact that these were very good books indeed — much better than the vast majority of children’s lit and a good swathe of “adult” lit.

It’s pretty rare that books make the news anyway (this doesn’t count): the last time a book there was this level of popular interest in a literary character was (this doesn’t count either) probably when Arthur Conan Doyle brought Sherlock Holmes back from the dead in 1903. So it’s great to live through something that probably won’t be repeated for quite some time.

So here’s to Harry and the Gang, and thank you to Jo Rowling for bringing them to us! (the picture above has been tested by independent experts and guaranteed to make you go “awww”)

And oh, some wicked Muggles have even put up pre-embargo reviews of Deathly Hallows (no major spoilers in there). I took the opportunity to put down some of my predictions for Book 7 as well.

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In an ideal world everyone would have full-content RSS feeds. Until then making your own isn’t that hard — and it’s getting easier by the day with mash-up tools like Yahoo Pipes. Here are some I’ve created:

• Digg Direct – links directly to the stories, instead of wasting your time with Digg’s comments page (Python source).
• BBC’s 10 Things We Didn’t Know Last Week – they have their own feed, but it isn’t full-text. This one is (’source’).
• Archie Comic of the Day (Python source)
• The Joy of Tech Comic – they have an RSS feed, but it doesn’t have images (Python source).

Update: added links to source code.

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