SimplePie… Yummy!

Flailing Wildly
Too much straw, not enough camel.

by Ryan Parman • July 20, 2004 • Code, Projects, Syndication, Technology • 5 comments

Have you ever wanted to create your own online RSS/Atom feed reader? Did you fiddle around with other solutions that just plain sucked? Did you try to use the awesome Magpie RSS, and just couldn’t get it to work like you wanted?

Personally, I’m still fairly new to PHP, but I have a solid understanding of scripting principles grasp of basic PHP syntax. Even still, I found Magpie a bit confusing sometimes as I was starting out with it. Because of this, I figured I’d try to make it easier for people like me to leverage Magpie’s power with a simpler command set.

I’d like you all to welcome SimplePie. SimplePie is short for “Simple API for Magpie”, and makes it very easy to create your own PHP-based feed readers on your own sites.

I’m sure it’s not flawless, so I’d like you all to download the latest copy of Magpie RSS and SimplePie, give it a try, and tell me how you like it and what I can do to make it better.

Ryan Parman is an entrepreneur, open source evangelist and passionate usability advocate currently living in Seattle. He is the founder and visionary behind SimplePie and CloudFusion, co-founder of WarpShare, member of the RSS Advisory Board, and creator of the AWS SDK for PHP. Ryan's aptly-named blog, Flailing Wildly, is where he writes about ideas longer than 140 characters.

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Discussion

David House

July 21, 2004

Looks great! Hope Dan Cederholme doesn’t think you’re invading his ‘Simple*’ brand…

kartooner

July 21, 2004

You know, I was just going to write you about possibly releasing whatever script you were using for your home-grown feed reading. Thanks Ryan. I’m downloading this today and testing it out!

Ryan Parman

July 21, 2004

This is a not-so-hacked-together, more-general-purpose script for creating an online Feed Reader. My blogroll system (which utilizes a primitive version of SimplePie) is VERY hacked together, and that is the next project on my list.

It’s cool because I don’t ever have to think about my blogroll. I simply upload my actual reading list in OPML format from Feed Demon, and my blogroll system does the rest automatically. I’m hoping to get that out before the end of summer.

Darice

July 21, 2004

I tried it out and it works simple just as you said Only it takes a while to load, I guess because it has to generate the whole feed each time. Right now I’m trying to get a $rss array working for multiple feed in one variable.

If you come up with a simple and light php based rss reader it will be a hit!

Ryan Parman

July 21, 2004

Darice, It might be a caching issue. I believe that by default, Magpie will refresh the cache once an hour. The lag is because Magpie is trying to contact the other server.

It might also be because get_feed_language() and get_item_author() use XMLize in addition to Magpie to patch some holes in Magpie’s Atom support… and there’s no caching with XMLize.

Try running the demo page (or whatever page you’re using) without those two functions, and see if it runs any faster.

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Flailing Wildly
Too much straw, not enough camel.