In the latest post to his blog Brian Swan hows how to interface PHP with "Dallas", a newly introduced technology from Microsoft that lets developers and users of the Azure platform share data with REST-based APIs.

Given that MIX10 is happening this week and that Microsoft Codename "Dallas" (CTP2) was just released, I thought it would be appropriate to look at how to consume "Dallas" data with PHP. [...] In this post I'll build a simple web page that displays some of the free "Dallas" data. And, I must say, I was really surprised at how simple and easy this entire process was.

The system shares out data sets (a list is here) including things like feeds from the Associated Press, InfoUSA, NASA, NAVTEQ and quite a few others. Brian includes screenshots on how to sign up for a data feed, some PHP that can be used to connect to it (just a REST request) and a simple web page that can output the results.

New on NETTUTS.com today there's a tutorial about building a simple RSS feed for your CodeIgniter application based on the contents of a MySQL database and a standard MVC setup of files to handle the request.

In this tutorial, we will build a RSS 2.0 Feed with the PHP framework CodeIgniter. After this tutorial, you will be able to build a feed for any custom website in no time at all.

The process (like the CodeIgniter framework) is a pretty simple one. He helps you set up the MySQL database and tables via phpMyAdmin and creates a simple model, view and controller to handle a "yourdomain.com/feed" request with an RSS document. All sample code is included, ready for you to cut and paste.

In this new post to his blog Padraic Brady points out that the Zend Framework component he's been working on, Zend_Feed_Reader, has officially been promoted into the trunk of the Zend Framework.

Zend_Feed_Reader grew out of my need to have something that is not just capable of reading feeds, but was capable of understanding and interpreting them. If you've used Zend_Feed, you know that getting something simple like content, or a creation date, is a task that requires a bit of work. [...] So, is Zend_Feed_Reader any different? Well, I hope so. But you'll have to dig a little deeper to see it.

He gives an example of its use showing how to import a few different feeds, looping through the components and how it compares to a similar Zend_Feed object.

In this new tutorial from NETTUTS.com there's information on how to create a gallery of the images from your Flickr account with help from SimplePie, a PHP tool for parsing XML feeds (like RSS).

Ok, so we're going to be touching on a number of technologies for this tutorial. We'll be using an RSS feed from Flickr, a bit of PHP, and some jQuery to make things nice and interactive! We'll use SimplePie to handle the RSS feed, as it makes life much easier, and can be used in any other projects where RSS feeds are involved.

They pull in the public photo information for a given user ID and parse details like the title of the gallery and each image's details, including descriptions. Add in a few links, some Javascript (jQuery) and HTML and you have a simple image gallery that automatically updates when you upload new photos to Flickr. You can grab the source here or just see it in action in their demo.

Smashing Magazine has a few helpful RSS tips and tricks for WordPress users out there:

Let's take a look at 10 useful, yet rather unknown RSS-tricks for WordPress. Each section of the article presents a problem, suggests a solution and provides you with an explanation of the solution, so that you can not just solve some of your RSS-related problems but also understand what you are actually doing.

Here's their list:

• Control When Your Posts are Available via RSS
• Redirecting WordPress Feeds to FeedBurner Feeds
• Insert Ads (or Anything Else) in Your RSS Feed
• Format Your Images for Feed Readers
• Provide Your Readers with a Feed for Each Post
• Exclude Categories from Your RSS Feed
• Display Any RSS Feed on Your WordPress Blog
• Use Category-Specific RSS Feeds
• List RSS Feeds by Category
• Get Rid of RSS Feeds the Clean Way

Based on some feedback that I got from readers a little while back (and some of my own thoughts before that), I've decided to split off the job postings to take them out of the main feed. Several people felt that they distract from the main portion of the site - the news.

They haven't gone to far, though - as you'll notice, there's now a "Jobs Feed" on the sidebar that you can subscribe to and get the latest jobs posted with us. This number is growing more and more every day, so it's a great place to keep up with. We've also moved them over to their own subdomain, jobs.phpdeveloper.org to keep things nice and tidy.

From here on out, if you want to find out about the latest job openings, you'll need to subscribe to the new jobs feed or check out the new subdomain, jobs.phpdeveloper.org to keep up with the latest postings. We'll still post the weekly summaries here in the main feed each Saturday for those that just want the overview.

I just wanted to take a second and get some opinions from the readers out there around the job postings that this site has been doing for a while now. They've become more popular in the recent months and I'm concerned that they might be "interrupting the flow" of the news around them.

I wanted to get your thoughts on them and on an idea I'm considering - splitting them off into their own sub-site sort of thing. Right now, you can go to jobs.phpdeveloper.org and get to the latest job postings without the news items. Do you, opinionated readers, think that they should stay over there and not be included with the news? Or do you like having them all in one place, all in one feed?

Post your opinions in the comments - I'll be interested to see what you think...

UPDATE: Several people in the comments have mentioned it, but I wanted to point out one option on the RSS feed - the filtering I have built in. It's tag based, so if you didn't want the job posts in there, you could subscribe to this feed: http://phpdeveloper.org/feed/tag/-job-post. That filters out the job posts for you. It wouldn't be hard to translate this into another "jobless" feed.

Padraic Brady has written up a post on how he implemented conditional fetching (GET) as a part of the Zend_Feed component of the Zend Framework.

You see, by default, Zend_Feed is stupid. It will blindly drag in whatever RSS you point it at, parse it, present an accessible API (which is largely an abstract API across PHP DOM), and then merrily sit back while you are driven demented. There is a problem in blindly fetching RSS and parsing it - RSS feeds from a huge number of online sources only change rarely. The rest of the time the feed is unchanged.

The key is in the "Last-Modified" header data of the remote file (and ETag). He shows how to use this knowledge in a simple example - pulling data with a ZFBlog_Aggregate class and dumping the contents into a database table. This code checks the return status for a 304 ("Not modified") and closes out the connection if so. Otherwise it grabs the content and updates the database with the most recent fetch times to compare to the "Last-Modified".

On the CSS Tricks blog there's a recent article showing how to combine the jQuery Javascript library and the SimplePie PHP feed aggregator to create a iPhone/mobile interface to any RSS feed.

We are going to create a web page that is formatted specifically for the iPhone (but would presumably be good for other mobile devices as well). This web page will dynamically fill itself with content from any RSS feed that you give it. The interface is going to be built to be easy to use on a mobile device, with large "touchable" areas and nice (jQuery) animations that whisk you between articles.

They work through the process - five simple steps:

• Create the iPhone Environment
• Pull in the RSS Feed
• Creating the Front Page: Headlines Only
• Creating the Article Pages: jQuery Slider Style
• Adding Some Flair

All code and images needed are included (as well as a demo if you'd like to try it out).

Just for you Lively early adopters out there, there's a script that's been posted to the International Stock Exchange forum showing how to get a feed into the virtual world.

Here is a free PHP script to convert the titles of a news feed to a PNG graphic for display in Google Lively. To display a news feed in Google Lively, go to the "Add object" button, search for "Picture Frame". Click on add to room and then edit properties. In Gadget Options place the url of the PHP script in the option box.

The script can then be hosted on a web server where it can pull down the latest stories and update the PNG image accordingly.