In a recent post to PHPMaster.com Kevin Mowry shows you how to use SimplePie, a simple to use programatic feed reader you can use to parse things like RSS feeds.

If you're an avid feed consumer like I am, you might be a bit sad to see Google's recent announcement of Reader reaching end of life. Reader was simple and easy to use, but there's no reason you can't have the same functionality with your own homegrown project. The PHP library SimplePie allows for quick and easy feed consumption and display. Here's how you can get started on your own feed reader.

He helps you get it installed (via Composer) and shows you how to use some of its most basic functionality to parse the New York Times' feed. He also includes examples of getting the information back out of the SimplePie object. There's also some snippets that show how to only get the latest items and how to cache the results.

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

Correcting himself from some previous comments concerning PHP 5 versus PHP 4 usage among developers, Marco Tabini has posted something new to his blog with some updated stats.

In the past, I have not been shy about sharing my opinion that the impending death of PHP 4 would have wreaked all sorts of havoc over the PHP world. I am glad to say that I've been wrong - dead wrong, in fact - and that I have never been as happy to be so far off the mark before.

According to a readers survey that the php|architect magazine ran (about a year ago even) PHP 5 is stronger than ever, taking up well over sixty percent of the usage with only a small part still hanging with PHP 4. Check out his graph for the full rankings.

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).

Doug Hill has decided to start a series on his blog that details some of the happenings in the PHP community for the past week, of which this is the first:

I spend way too much time reading blogs, surfing PHP and web development articles online. I resolve to cut back but things just sneak back into my reader somehow, and believe me dzone doesn't help. But I've came up with a way to justify all that time, I call it research.

He mentions things like the infamous CIO article, Zend's Jolt Award, comparing the Zend Framework versus PEAR and PHP releases, books and various other language-related tidbits.

Check out the post for more and keep an eye on Doug's blog for future weekly summaries.

ProDevTips.com has posted the thier part of their series looking at building a feed reader with Ajax, the Zend Framework and Smarty (see parts one and two here).

This time we will take a look at the feed list window and the manage window. This will also be the concluding part of the series.

All of the code is provided (a full download is here for all three parts) and they gloss over a lot of the code assuming you know something about reading it - including a lot of the HTML for the presentation.

ProDevTips.com has posted part two of their look at creating a feed reader with Ajax, the Zend Framework and Smarty today.

In this latest part, they pick up where they left off before and march on towards the goal. They point out another tutorial over on the IBM developerWorks website that can help you understand a bit more about the Ajax side of things before getting into part 2, but it's not a requirement.

They create the page with the Javascript include files and a form with a button to make the action happen.

On the ProDevTips.com website, there's a new tutorial (part one of a series) that walks the developer through the integration of the Zend Framework, some Ajax functionality and Smarty to create a feed reader.

In this series I will walk you through the code of a site that uses only Ajax and Scriptaculous to handle it's completely windowed interface. Making an interface like this is not really good design, it's only done here for the sake of teaching. It is kinda cool though. Especially if you have a big screen.

The source code is available for download and having it makes the installation and setup of the system much simpler. With it, you're only about fifteen steps away from getting the application up and running.

The HowTo Forge website has this new tutorial posted today taking an extensive look (complete with tons of screenshots and code along the way) on how to create a Facebook RSS reader to add to your blog of choice.

This guide shows how you can build an RSS feed reader application for the social network Facebook that will display your blog's/web site's RSS feed on the profile pages of Facebook users (that have installed the RSS feed reader application). Each item of the RSS feed will have a Share button so that people can share the story with their friends, and the application will have an Invite link so that people can invite up to ten friends at once to also install this feed reader application.

They use PHP5's functionality to make building the reader simple and take advantage of Facebook's simple application system to make the reader. You can stop after the first few steps of the tutorial and have a working application, but they take it further. They show how to make customizations to the reader, making the feed auto-update, creating an icon for the app and make an invite page.

In this new tutorial from DevShed (in their "RSS Reader" series), they finally get down to the real heart of the application - the code.

The other other two parts prepared you for this, the creation of the actual RSS file - correctly formatted and filled with data. They also include a simple feed reader so you can ensure your document can be read correctly.

Unfortunately, they chose to go with a long line of fwrites to push out each line of the file instead of pushing it all into one string and writing that. Using the multiples makes more work for the file handling and could result in a slowdown for a large amount of items in the RSS file.