TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

The value of database indexing

Sheesh. I just sped up the TechWatching.com script that writes the main page by an order of magnitude just by looking at my queries and re-jiggering related table indexes. I am a total amateur and have the greatest of respect for those who’ve made databasing and computer science their career.

Now onto sorting out character encoding and why 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 feeds that Magpie happily picks up. So I’m back to Magpie and its related problems.

database, indexes, magpierss simplepie

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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

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