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.

In one of his recent blog entries, Brian Moon takes a look at what he considers the "proper use" of the PHP superglobal $_REQUEST (as brought on by a thread on the PHP internals mailing list.

I have seen more than one person make the following logic mistake: I may get data via GET, I may get data via POST - Ah, I should use $_REQUEST as it will catch both.

Brian points out the error - cookies aren't in $_REQUEST so improper handling of those values could lead to cookie data overwriting GET/POST data from $_REQUEST. Several of the comments on the post also warn against improper handling of the values, noting that doing so could lead to holes open for attacks (like session fixation).