dangerouslyawesome

back in august/september, i built a feed aggregating home page for Inspiration Festival. For that project I used code from magpie to manage parsing of various RSS feeds. It got the job done, and definately did a huge amount of legwork…but I had to do some really wacky array manipulation to get at the data from each feed that I wanted. Also, since there was slight variations in the feeds, I had to compensate for that. Overall, I came up with a pretty slick mediating layer between magpie and my interface that I have since reimplimented…but it was starting to get unruly. One of the biggest things i disliked about magpie was it’s large set of dependant files…a couple of dozen files in a magpie directory (sure, some were documentation but nonetheless) made adding my solution to new projects a bit messy.

enter simplepie. self proclaimed solution to the admitted pain in the ass that magpie can be. Since i’m doing a similar feed aggregation for another quickie project, i decided to take simple pie for a spin.

and it wins, in a big way. without dwelling too much on my particular implementation, two of it’s strongest suits are:

• simple 1 file installation
• a great set of function documentation (that’s readable!)

my 2 biggest complaints with magpie nailed in 1 shot. could I really ask for more? I suppose we’ll see as i delve into usage of this library. More to come.

update: for the project I’m working on, simplepie cut 36 lines of code down to 13. ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

in the spirit of keeping business and pleasure separate, i’m going to do my best to keep this blog reserved for more personal thoughts, ideas, and discoveries and use the we know html blog for business-y stuff.

the layout is a mix of my own site template and the gorgeously simple microformat-friendly sandbox theme.

everything appears to be working, but i could use some more testing. so hit it up, leave some comments, see if anything breaks or is missing.

i am a machine.