PHPDeveloper.org

NETTUTS.com: Building a Better BlogRoll: Dynamic Fun with SimplePie and jQuery

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:23:13 -0500

In this recent tutorial from the NETTUTS website, they show how to "build a better blogroll" by combining the client-side power of jQuery with the simplicity of the SimplePie aggregation tool.

A traditional blogroll is a simple list of other sites, often in the sidebar, that are related, owned by, or otherwise friendly to the home site. Blogrolls are a great idea and on-point with the spirit of blogging, but how is a casual reader to know if any of these sites are truly of interest? Let's improve upon the concept of a blogroll by not just listing sites, but dynamically pulling recent headlines from them, and using some fun jQuery animation.

Their code (demo here) uses a CSS-based layout and simple pagination to switch between multiple groupings of RSS feed content.

Ben Ramsey's Blog: Flickr Namespace and array_multisort() Issues

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 11:33:00 -0600

Ben Ramsey has posted a (quick) new items over on his blog that looks at solving two problems he was having with his blog - the now non-functional Flickr feed and a sorting problem with array_multisort.

I recently upgraded a few things around here (in particular, an upgrade to PHP 5.2), and I noticed two issues that occurred after the upgrade. [...] I easily solved both of these issues.

The correction to the Flickr feed involved changing the namespace information for his request (adding a trailing slash) because the SimpleXML functionality got a bit more particular about the format.

The problem with array_multisort involved adding in a parameter that was implied in previous PHP versions, SORT_STRING, to get his code correctly working.

Ben Ramsey's Blog: Generating OPML From del.icio.us (And Getting All Your Links)

Mon, 08 May 2006 06:28:05 -0500

Ben Ramsey, looking for a way to more efficiently manage his list of sites he reads (the OPML list), has discovered a way to get around the 30 item limit that the del.icio.us restricts a user to (thus only 30 items on the OPML list) through the use of the site's own API.

I investigated a way to get around the 30-feed limitation in del.icio.us, and I found that their API allows you to do just this, albeit with a few restrictions of its own, which I'll explain in a few moments. Using the del.icio.us API, instead of their RSS feeds, I was able to use the following code to first check whether my del.icio.us account has been updated since I last cached their data, and, if so, to grab all of the links for a particular tag and cache the data to a file for later use:

The code is simple and uses the SimpleXML PHP functionality to grab all of the items tagged with "blogroll" and parse through them, echoing them back out as simple links (to a "blogroll" section on a site). He has the script firing nightly, regenerating the OPML file each time, making it simple to automatically keep his list up-to-date while only having to update in one place.

Ben Ramsey's Blog: OPML Reading List

Fri, 05 May 2006 06:46:31 -0500

Ben Ramsey has a new note today mentioning Scott Johnson's OPML reading list as well as a note about his own list.

The other day, I came across Scott Johnson's PHP OPML Reading List. Offering an OPML reading list for others to download is a great idea, and, since I've not yet blogged about it, I wanted to point out that I've been doing this for a long while now. On my home page, under the "syndicate" heading, is a link to my OPML blogroll. Feel free to import my OPML into your feed reader; that's what it's there for. (Please also note that I use SimpleXML to generate the blogroll on my home page from this list.)

You can check out Ben's blogroll OPML listing here for some more quality PHP-related reading material.