Its not secret, I love social networking, I cant get enough of it. I also love programming and anything internet related. I'm not sure how I came across it, but a PHP based, Object Oriented RSS caching tool named SimplePie caught my attention.

SimplePie offers one piece of functionality that he found particularly useful - the ability to merge RSS feeds easily. He took advantage of the ability and pulled together his Twitter, Flickr, Pownce, Digg and Youtube RSS feeds to make one mega-feed. You can see an example of it in action over on his personal site.

Adding an RSS feed to your site is quick and painless, and can be done with pure PHP (and some kind of data source). After the jump, 3 simple steps to building an RSS feed in php.

The steps are pretty simple - figure out what content you want to serve, set up the basic RSS XML structure, and loop through your data to push it in to the template and echoed out. Some simple example code is included.

Web services are the coolest technology I know of that ends up turning everyone off. I don't know about you, but when I go to a lecture on Web services, invariably tons of acronyms come out [...] and then I start to nod off and dream about a land where free Krispy Kreme donuts grow on trees.

He reframes the web services world away from the acronyms and strict standards to more towards using it as a method of communication between apps, letting them engage in some friendly conversation. He uses the rest of the tutorial showing how to create an RSS reader of sorts using dashes of PEAR, XML, C#, XSLT, Ajax and Flex.

In this entry I explore Zend_Feed from the perspective of someone aggregating RSS and Atom feeds with a view to building a database of uniquely identified content for later presentation in a "Planet" style application. [...] In fact all we create here is a simple command line script to aggregate content frequently (e.g. just set up cron to run it every hour or so) into a database for later presentation.

He guides you through each step of the way:

• Setting Up Database And Models
• The Aggregator Script Foundation
• Using Zend_Feed to get common data for RSS/Atom entries
• Putting It All Together

There's plenty of code (and SQL to insert) in the post and he explains each point well, helping to make the development process smoother. There's even a summary section to toss in a few extra bits of information just in case you missed them along the way.