dangerouslyawesome: alex hillman » magpie http://dangerouslyawesome.com Sun, 20 May 2012 06:32:51 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 php feed handling, now with less kludge http://dangerouslyawesome.com/2006/11/php-feed-handling-now-with-less-kludge/ http://dangerouslyawesome.com/2006/11/php-feed-handling-now-with-less-kludge/#comments Sun, 05 Nov 2006 04:36:12 +0000 Alex Hillman http://www.dangerouslyawesome.com/2006/11/04/php-feed-handling-now-with-less-kludge/ 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:

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.

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