If you're a regular reader of PHPDeveloper.org, you know that there's a few articles posted here (almost) daily about what's happening in the PHP world. Unfortunately, this only scratches the surface of the quality content that's out there. In an effort to provide more PHP goodness to the community as a whole, PHP Quick Fix has been launched - a service linking to stories that don't make it on PHPDeveloper.org.

All of the stories on PHP Quick Fix (you can also follow it on twitter) are still hand-selected out of the mounds of PHP content that shows every day to ensure the best quality. There's no automatic syndication here - just more good, useful PHP (and related topics) to add to your day.

Additionally, if you're interested to see how it all works (thanks to a GimmeBar backend) check out this post on blog.phpdeveloper.org.

If you're a last.fm user and have been curious about how to get the latest list of your "last played" selections, Philip Norton has just the code you'll need.

The other day I was approached by a friend (Julie Cheung) and asked if I could create some code that would display a list of last played tracks from last.fm. Julie isn't a PHP developer and so the code I gave her had to be easily understandable so that she could edit it herself if needed. The following code is what I came up with.

The code pulls from the defined user's "recenttracks" feed and parses it (via a simplexml_load_string call) into an object that's looped through and outputted. Data that comes back from the feed includes artist anme, name of the track, a URL to more information about it and an image of the album cover. He also includes an updated version that caches the data for three minutes so it's not always relying on the last.fm servers to be there.

Rob Allen has posted a method he's come up with for displaying an RSS feed right in with the rest of the content of your WordPress blog. The key is in the simplicity of the MagpieRSS library.

My wife decided that she wanted to display a list of her latest AudioBoos in the sidebar of her blog. She looked at the AudioBoo JavaScript widget but decided it wasn't subtle enough and so she enlisted me to solve her problem. It turns out that AudioBoo has an RSS feed, so a simple plugin was required. I had a quick look on the extension site, but most are now "widgets" which her theme isn't set up for or didn't provide an unsigned list. Hence, I whipped up a small extension for her.

With the help of Magpie, a simple call to "fetch_rss" was all it took to pull in the AudioBoo RSS feed and a bit of PHP to loop through it and pull out the relevant bits. They're all displayed in a simple list - you can see it in action on her blog (look for the "Audioboo Updates" section).

On Qafoo.com there's a new tool that's been introduced to help you keep track of the current Call for Papers that are currently happening for PHP conferences. The start of the PHP conference season is in full swing, and sometimes it can be hard to keep up. Their Call for Papers Manager can keep that information at your fingertips.

The tool works quite simple: You can add CFPs you know about and which are relevant for the PHP community through a simple form. In order to remember the CFPs, you can configure two kinds of reminders: fFor upcoming CFPs and for ending CFPs. For each of these lists, you can determine when to be reminded, like 2 days before the event occurs. These lists can then be easily integrated into your normal feed reader using an RSS or Atom feed.

You can use the URL requested to get different kinds of reminders delivered to your feed reader too. If you have a conference and your Call for Papers is open or upcoming, add it to the list!

In a new post to his blog today Gonzalo Ayuso talks about video streaming and PHP. Well, okay, not so much using PHP for playing the video, more for the security and streaming around the streaming feeds.

For example we want to show videos only to registered users based on our authentication system. Imagine we're using sessions for validate users. That's means we cannot put the media in a public folder and point our media player to those files. We can obfuscate the file name but it'll remain public. In this small tutorial We're going to see how to implement it with PHP.

Since the video stream he wants to deal with is a live one (and not a single video file that can be read all at once) he shows how to use the output buffering functions in PHP to output small chunks of the data at a time with the correct headers attached.

Brian Swan has a new post to his blog today about consuming protected feeds of OData coming from SQL Azure in a PHP application.

I did write a post a few weeks ago that described how to enable anonymous access to SQL Azure OData feeds (Consuming SQL Azure Data with the OData SDK for PHP), but I had a few things to learn about AppFabric access control before I felt comfortable writing about authenticated access to these feeds.

He starts from the Azure side, creating a sample OData feed and adding permissions to only allow access to a specific (database) user for the feed. You'll use a set of data to connect to the feed - a username, a secret key, an issuer name and the OData endpoint address. Then, using the OData SDK he shows how to generate the needed classes with the automatic tool and use them to connect to the endpoint and retrieve data from the feed. He also includes a little snippet for those that might not want to use the SDK - an example using curl to connect and authorize the session.

In a new post to his blog Cal Evans has posted five twitter accounts that he's used to replace his feed reader for everyday reading:

I have given up on feed readers. I never did like them much to begin with and have found over the past couple of years that twitter does a better job of showing me interesting blog posts than Google Reader ever did. In addition to recommendations from friends however, there are a hand full of accounts that I follow to keep up with what is going on.

Here's his list of the five accounts to follow:

• @phpdeveloper (yup, that's us!)
• @planetphp
• @weierophinney (Matthew Weier O'Phinney)
• @phpc
• @phpcamp

In a new post to his blog William shows you how to create a Popurls clone with the powerful combination of PHP and jQuery. Popurls is an aggregation site with some of the latest news and happenings from all around the web.

Since I have a crazy workload right now, I feel this is the perfect time to write a quick n' dirty tutorial on how to build your very own Popurls. Impress your friends and/or boss with a nifty, hand made news aggregator. Yes, very buzz word friendly.

He uses the SimplePie library to pull in the information from various feeds including Digg.com, Reddit.com, Wired's news feed and Engadget. He shows how to use regular expressions to extract information from the feeds (if they're uncooperative), a bit of PHP to work around potentially empty fields and the full jQuery/HTML/CSS you'll need to make it look more like this

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.