Fun with SimplePie
by Rob Mason ~ September 19th, 2008 Filed under: Work.
In an attempt to extend my PHP skillset some more, I’ve been playing around with SimplePie. For those not in the know it you can take multiple RSS feeds from anywhere and re-purpose them somewhere else - Popurls is probably the most well know.
Why?
So I’ve created is News for Tewkesbury. As I said it’s primary purpose is an intellectual exercise to help me develop my PHP skills. I hope some day soon will become a fully fledged website in it’s own right - hence the judiciously placed Amazon adverts!
How?
The structure is taken from Raj Shah’s News Aggregator, which in turn used Ryan Parman’s Newsblocks. Most of the code was kept as-is, but some other parts were chucked away as not being required. There’s a few tweaks here and there for my own needs, such as the focus on web standards to get ampersands to render correctly and rudimentary hand-held style sheet support. I’ve mixed in Nice Titles by Stuart Langridge, although my implementation is a bit buggy on some feeds - not sure of that’s the feeds or my code though. The “design” is all mine, but thanks must go to Mike Warren for the background image and Mark James for his famous icons. Also the contact form is from Mike Cherim
Tweaking and testing
It needs some extra work such as AJAX-ifying the feed refresh, help to speed it up and ensure suitable cross-browser compatibility. It’s been tested in Opera, Safari, Firefox and IE7, but if you do find any issues in other browsers please let me know. For the record I won’t be fixing any IE6 related issues - it’s time that died, but that’s another story for another time.
By all means check out News for Tewkesbury and let me know what you think.
