TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

SimplePie RSS Parsing

I just switched TechWatching from MagpieRSS to SimplePie. Each of these is an automated RSS feed parser built for PHP, and both feature great features like caching, http-last-modified intelligent requests to lessen the overhead of feed-checking, etc. MagpieRSS, for whatever reason, has died on the vine - i.e.: last blog post is October of 2006. SimplePie has stepped up in the meantime to fill the gap.

So - I’m looking forward to not having to deal with a bunch of problems I thought I’d have to hack Magpie to handle - character encoding, CDATA encoded content blocks, inconsistent namespaces, etc - SimplePie does an awesome job of handling feeds and their data. Big shout out to the SimplePie folks for their great work - thank-you.

rss, simplepie techwatching

One Response to “SimplePie RSS Parsing”

The value of database indexing « TechFold | January 3rd, 2008 at 5:47 pm

[…] Magpierss doesn’t seem to like CDATA blocks — arghh. BTW - the move I wrote about to SimplePie? Hasn’t quite worked out. For whatever reason, SimplePie disregards a lot of blog posts in […]