John Highland has a quick tutorial showing how to create a lifestream with PHP out of all of the RSS feeds surrounding the multiple social networking and blogging sites you have out there (with the help of SimplePie).

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.

On the Zend Developer Zone, a new tutorial has been posted that anyone looking to "blend feeds" might want to take a look at. It's a guide to using the Zend_Feed component of the Zend Framework to combine the contents of multiple RSS feeds.

As part of my playing around with the Zend Framework, I've decided to make this merged RSS feed using the Zend_Feed component. Actually at the end I've realized that this merged feed idea is quite useless, but at least this post came out of it :-)

He developed it originally as a way to combine his twitter and blog feeds into one thing to provide the latest updates to readers from both in one simple place. He shows how to take in the two feeds, each in its own feed object and merge them into one array. This array is then pushed back out to the visitor an the RSS format (thanks to Zend_Feed_Rss).