All Automated, All The Time

I recently posted that I was going to begin redesigning my site. Beyond just a change of colors and images, I wanted to create a more powerful underlying system.

Movable Type offers a lot of options and features that are built-in to the CMS, but I get a few too many 500 errors to stay happy. In that vein, I’m wanting to extend the functionality of my website using PHP, MySQL, XML, and other related technologies that I’m learning as we speak.

One of the first new features for this site has little impact on you, but saves me a bit of work. That is the Blogs I Read section. Using a combination of RSS, OPML, and PHP, I’ve got a pretty spiffy system in place. If I come across a site that I like, I’ll add its RSS feed to Feed Demon. From there, I simply export the OPML file to my hard drive, then upload it to my webserver.

From there, PHP does all the handling to dynamically generate the content of each of the pages: Apple, CSS Design, General Web, etc. If a feed fails to be read, I use the information supplied in my OPML file to create a filler spot. No problem.

Granted, not everybody prefers to create a section of their site for this, but if anyone does, I’ll be releasing the PHP source as soon as I get all the bugs and quirks worked out.

How’s that for automated?

Discussion

Jeremy Flint

February 20, 2004

Nice addition Ryan.

I use a PHP script (hat tip to Ethan@sidesh0w) that copies an xml file from blo.gs that is generated from my favorites list.

Some of the pages in the Blogs I Read section seemed to pull slow, but that could have been network lag here at the office.

One suggestion I have is to maybe have a “List All” option so that if someone wanted to, they could view the entire list rather than going category to category.

Anyway, good job. Can’t wait to get a look at that PHP.

Ryan Parman

Part of the reason for the lag is because my web server has to contact the other web servers, and wait for a response. The longer the response takes, the longer it takes for my page to load. I haven’t implemented any sort of caching yet — mostly because I don’t know how yet. If someone has a script for that, it’d be appreciated.

I used to list all of the blogs on a single page, but as I began to read more and more sites, the list grew to the point where I felt it should be broken up into categories. On the other hand, with this new automated system, I don’t believe it would be too hard to create something like that.

I’ll definitely look into it.

Jeremy, according to your suggestion, I’ve created an “All Feeds” page. Using this new method, it only took me about three minutes to implement. Thanks for the idea.

People have asked me why I don’t just display the sites I read on my front page like everyone else. Mainly because (a) There’s simply not enough room, and (b) I read so many sites, that I think something like this actually works better in my case.

waylman

Very nice. I was thinking of doing something like this when I get the time, so the source would be nice.

As far a cacheing goes, yeasterday I read this article : http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-anthology-2-5-caching/1
It might just get you pointed in the right direction. It covers a lot of different types of cacheing but I think you’ll want to check out page 3: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-anthology-2-5-caching/3 which discusses the Cache_Lite class. Hope it helps.

Take a look at this PHP script.

http://philringnalda.com/phpblogroll/

It is a basic version of what I use for my “Routine” sidebar. It looks up the xml file at blo.gs and copies it to a local xml file. When the script it called, it checks to see when the local file was last written to. If it was less than an hour, it leaves it alone, if it was more than an hour, it grabs a fresh copy from blo.gs and overwrites the local one.

hope that helps.

Flailing Wildly
Too much straw, not enough camel.