Nearly every major feature has been enhanced, as well as the addition of several new ones. Be sure to read the upgrade docs if you’re upgrading from Beta 1 or the Preview Release. People who were using trunk builds should be able to just drop this file in as a replacement for any previous simplepie.inc file.

We’ve also added a WordPress plugin and a MediaWiki extension to the mix. And as always, if you have any questions, comments, or need clarification on anything, be sure to swing by the support forums. We’re there a lot.

Enjoy!

I could sit here and go over each and every things that’s new or better or changed, but I’ve already done that. To find out more about SimplePie, and what all it can do, check out the official SimplePie website.

It’s been a year since the last SimplePie release, but that doesn’t mean the project is dead. Fortunately I was able to get some help from Geoffers, and he actually ended up driving most of the development since he came on board over the summer.

I wish I could tell you that a shiny new version 1.0 was available, but alas, not yet. What we do have, however, is a shiny new Preview Release — soon.

What is SimplePie? Let me tell you:

SimplePie is a very fast and easy-to-use class, written in PHP, for reading RSS and Atom syndication feeds. By keeping it simple, and focusing on what’s important, we’ve built a pretty sweet little API. SimplePie’s focus has been two-fold: speed and ease of use, and has been very successful on both fronts.

Expect to see a new SimplePie Preview Release and a matching website in the next few days.

For those of you currently using SimplePie, this new version makes more strides towards improving support for sucky feeds, tested support for PHP 5, and other bits of fine-tuning.

You can download it, read the documentation for changes in this version, and report bugs and get support.

The only other thing that might be worth mentioning is that SimplePie still has a difficult time with non-encoded special characters in feeds and feeds in non-western-european/non-american/non-australian languages. Beyond that, it’s pretty solid so far.

Now, before I get to explaining, I’ll point to a del.icio.us demo with SimplePie in action. Now, here’s the code as a whole:

<?php
include_once("../simplepie.inc");

@ $rss = simplepie("http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/web", false, true, 0.02);

if ($rss != false) {
	print("<p>Reading from " . get_feed_url() . "</p>");
	print("<ul>");

	for ($x=0; $x < 15; $x++) {
		print('<li><a href="' . get_item_permalink($x, $rss) . '">' . get_item_title($x, $rss) . '</a></li>');
	}

	print("</ul>");
}
else {
	print("The del.icio.us feed is not currently available.");
}

print("Powered by " . sp_linkback());
?>

Let’s begin with the first part, include_once("../simplepie.inc");. This is an instance of including the SimplePie library. In my example, the simplepie.inc file is located in the subdirectory.

The next line is where we start processing the rss feed:

@ $rss = simplepie("http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/web", false, true, 0.02);

We start by passing the first parameter, which tells SimplePie where the feed is that we want to process. The second parameter asks whether or not to enable a mode called XMLDump, which we don’t need for this excersize. The third parameter asks whether we want to cache the feed that we’re reading. Since SimplePie currently doesn’t work if the feed isn’t cached (unless it’s a local file), this needs to be true. Lastly, we tell SimplePie how many hours before refreshing the cached feed. We then set the feed to the $rss variable.

Next, we check whether the feed actually exists and was processed. If the expression if ($rss != false) (if $rss is not false…) is true, then we begin displaying the del.icio.us feed.

If you so choose, you can display the URL of the feed you’re using with the get_feed_url() function. I also chose to have this display as an unordered list, since that’s really what it is.

Inside of that <ul></ul> code block, I’ve set up a for-loop. Using $x as my counter variable, I decided to display only the most recent 15 entries. If you want to display all entries in the feed, you can use the get_item_quantity($rss) function.

As a backup plan, I like to add a short message for when the feed isn’t working. In my case, I said that “The del.icio.us feed is not currently available.” Simple and to-the-point.

Next, you want to tell everybody how you made all of this really cool stuff happen by linking back to the SimplePie project page. The easiest way is with the sp_linkback() function.

There! You should now have a fully-functional del.icio.us sidebar right there in your website.

If you’d like to test out the current Beta build (2004.12.03), you can do so a couple of ways:

• Basic Online Feed Reader utilizing the latest version of SimplePie
• The SimplePie source file
• The documentation file for this particular build

Please take the time to test it with your feeds that you read. I’ve also enabled an option that allows you to see how the feed’s source code is modified by SimplePie. This is great for debugging and for helping test.

If you have any bug reports, please list them in the Bug Report forum. The same goes for feature requests and questions and comments.

Thanks for helping to make SimplePie great!

This version is pretty much feature-complete. The only remaining pre-1.0 work will be testing and catching any remaining bugs. I might add a couple of minor features, but nothing too major. I’m open to feature requests for the 1.0 – 1.1 releases, so if SimplePie is missing something or if it should have something that other parsers don’t, let me know.

« Update » If you downloaded SimplePie within 60 minutes of this posting, you should re-download it. I fixed a glitch that affected feeds from East of GMT, and some related documentation.

There’s still a smidge of fine-tuning left to do. Although I fixed a very high number of feeds in this release, I broke a small handful of others. The newly broken feeds include Forever Geek’s RSS (not Atom) feed, Asa’s notblog*, News.com, and GameSpot feeds. Out of a list of approximately 334 test feeds (374 total – 30 duplicates – 10 no longer exist), only 9 aren’t working. Not too shabby, I’d say.

I’ll probably begin working on v0.95 on Saturday. Here is a list of things I plan to do in time for the 0.95 release:

• Finish fine-tuning the regular expressions I use for supporting bad feeds.
• Add the ability to display images in feeds, even though the server is set to block the display of images on other sites.
• Encode all tags used inside <code></code> tags.
• Get speed back to v0.93 levels.
• Improve the ability to display feed dates.
• Improve support for relative URL’s in feeds.

Keep watching this space. Hopefully it won’t take me another month to get the new version out. Come to think of it, have you all gone and bugged Señor Paul about getting SPG 1.1 done yet? If not, you should. He might forget to work on it otherwise. *grin*

The downside is that it slowed SimplePie down a bit. I think that it’s something I’ll let slide for this version, and try to tackle it for the next. I still need to go back through the list of 300+ feeds to make sure I haven’t broken something else, but assuming that all goes well, I’ll post SimplePie 0.94 sometime tonight or tomorrow.

I hope you all are using it, or are planning to use it. It’s good software, really… and no, I’m not trying to float my own boat. If you find any bugs or would like to see something added, let me know.

SimplePie takes a very Apple-esque approach to feed parsing. Coming from the use of MagpieRSS, I decided to create a “feed parser for the rest of us”. One that is easy, logical, and doesn’t require too much of a background in PHP to use it. My background is in JavaScript, so I believe that if you have a handle on JavaScript and can spend an hour learning about some of the nuances of basic PHP, you should be able to implement SimplePie with little or no fuss.

There are many feed parsers out there that only support one or two flavors of RSS. Most still don’t even have Atom support yet. They all go through and create this whole big array, and then just leave it all sitting there for you to figure out. Maybe they’ll even throw in some caching while they’re at it. Good for them.

When building SimplePie, I wanted to make it as easy as possible for someone to be able to use it. I looked at a variety of desktop and web-based feed readers to get a feel for the most used and most useful RSS tags, and then I created a collection of functions for those specific purposes. Going with a Firefox-like mentality, I made sure to support everything that most people would want/need while maintaining the ability to extend it as need be.

As Mac OS X is built upon a powerful Unix-based core, SimplePie is built upon a very powerful, yet easy-to-use XML parsing library called XMLize. XMLize takes a fantastic approach to parsing XML documents in a very simple, logical way. I was parsing XML documents within 10 minutes of having found it. This easy-to-use software makes it easy for anyone — even PHP newbies — to extend the power of SimplePie.

Switching from MagpieRSS to using XMLize at the core allows SimplePie to process RSS and Atom feeds at incredible speeds. SimplePie is also aware of some common problems in feeds and makes adjustments as necessary. Does your current feed reader leave you with visible entities or odd question marks? SimplePie automatically handles some of these common glitches, so that the end user doesn’t see anything too wierd when trying to view their favorite feeds.

If you’re looking for new feed parser software, or even if you’re not, give SimplePie a try. If you’re new to PHP, or even if you’re not, SimplePie can save you time and stress. If you’re looking for a feed parser that can be easily extended to do more than it currently does out-of-the-box, SimplePie is your answer.

Download Now! File servers are standing by.

What I need from you are your reading lists. Whatever sites you read or follow via RSS or Atom, I want to know about them. If you’ve got Feed Demon, SharpReader, RSS Bandit, NetNewsWire, Shrook, PulpFiction, or another feed reader, do me a favor and export your feed listings in OPML format (which would be the easiest thing for you) and upload them to your website somewhere. Then, leave a comment that contains the URL to that OPML file. I’ll then go through each and every site and find each and every RSS or Atom feed and test them one-by-one to make sure that SimplePie is as solid and production-ready as possible.

The higher the quantity of feeds I’m able to test, the better SimplePie will be. I know that most of the (standards-compliant) blogging world is pretty solid, but I’ve noticed that many development and programming-related sites have horrendous feeds. I’m also going through the Feed Demon forums and testing as many of those feeds as I can.

Your help would be tremendously appreciated!

For those who are skeptical of “yet another feed parser”, or are hesitant to switch to (or begin using) SimplePie, let me explain it this way. Most RSS parsers go through this process of breaking a feed down into this big array, which may be fine for some, but can be impossible for beginners and newbies. SimplePie takes an Apple-esque approach by providing thoughtfully-named, easy to use functions that do what one would expect them to do.

At the core, SimplePie relies on XMLize (as the easy-to-use Mac OS X relies on the more powerful Unix-based core), which is a very powerful, yet elegantly simple class for parsing XML documents with PHP. This means that if SimplePie doesn’t do all that you want it to out-of-the-box (which would be suprising, but possible), you can easily extend it to support whatever else you might want.

I’ve frozen the current function set where it’s at. This means that if you’ve been using SimplePie already, or if you’re wanting to start using it, you won’t need to change any of your code as new versions get released. You’ll simply need to replace the old SimplePie library with the new one to take advantage of new improvements. New functions may become available to use, but new versions of SimplePie will not break existing services and applications.

If you’ve been thinking about building your own web-based RSS/Atom reader, why not give SimplePie a try?

While working on SimplePie initially, I used copies of Dunstan’s Atom and RSS feeds because I felt that they’d be representative of most people’s decently well-formed feeds. I know that some people have worse feeds, and that Mark Pilgrim’s feeds are a bit too “academically” correct.

Dunstan has a problem with his feed. He uses the numeric entity for a “smart-apostrophe” in his feed’s <title> tag. This happens to be a UTF-8 character. For whatever reason, parsing his feed in every PHP-based feed reader I’ve ever used displays that smart-apostrophe as a question mark. In wanting to build a “feed parser for the rest of us”, I decided to be smart and wrap a CDATA section around the contents of the <title>, <link>, and <description> on the fly for those that don’t already have them. Dunstan’s question mark becomes the character that it’s supposed to be. No problem.

On the other hand, Andrei also has a problem with his feed. Well, not really… it’s just that the fix I put in place to fix Dunstan’s feed broke Andrei’s feed. Andrei does a fake-out with his CDATA sections. He closes the CDATA section in <description>, then has one last bit of content before closing the tag. This is just enough to get past SimplePie’s logic. Wonderful.

Since Dunstan’s issue is only in the feed’s <title> tag, I went ahead and changed how SimplePie handles the feeds by removing the code for wrapping CDATA sections around <link> and <description>. Both Dunstan and Andrei have working feeds again.

Then, I go and test it on Mark’s Feed Parser project feed. SimplePie breaks down again. Well, crap. Instead of using <title> like normal people, Mark has to be all cool by using <title type="text/plain">. Argh.

So, I’m off to find some code that can resolve this little quarrel. I’m thinking about going through and looking for UTF-8 entities (4-digit, typically begins with an 8: ’) and wrapping CDATA sections around those entities alone, which will probably work. I don’t want to release this software as 1.0 until it performs satisfactorily with every single feed in my entire reading list.

Version 0.92 is on it’s way here folks. Andrew, how’s that WordPress plug-in coming along?

The only complaints that I got were mostly speed-related. Most people who sent me feedback thought that SimplePie was just too darn slow. Unfortunately, the speed issues were directly related to my use of Magpie RSS as the parsing engine.

So, I decided to re-write it completely from scratch. I did away with Magpie altogether, and built a brand-new feed parser based around Hans Anderson’s XMLize library for parsing XML documents with PHP. The results were astounding!

I removed all external dependencies. SimplePie is now completely self-contained. Also, I tweaked with the way that SimplePie parses RSS feeds. In doing so, I’ve got v0.9 running anywhere from 20 to 162 times faster than v0.8. Specifically, it’s a maximum speed increase of over 16215%. On average, however, it only runs around 100 times faster than the previous version. As a matter of fact, I’ve never seen v0.9 take longer than 0.35 seconds to process and render a RSS feed.

If you’re looking for some RSS parsing software for PHP, I hope that SimplePie will be your choice. Of course, I’m always open to feature requests and bug reports, so let me know if you have something to say…

You can download SimplePie 0.9 from the SimplePie Project Page.

The first is Gaim. Gaim is an IM client for Windows/Linux that can log into AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, and others. I know that a lot of people use Trillian, and it already does that. Two features that make me suggest Gaim over Trillian are: (1) You can give people real names (you can set aliases), rather than being stuck with screen names. (2) You can group multiple screen names together as a single person. This is very helpful if some of your buddies have multiple screen names, or are logged on to multiple services at once. Instead of listing your best friend 5 times, you only see them once in your buddy list. Very handy.

The next is Adium X. Adium X is an IM client for Mac OS X. It is very customizable, and the development team seems to want to create a fun product… which is what they’ve done. You can customize sound sets, smileys, IM message display, the Dock icon, and a few other things.

For RSS readers, I’d suggest Feed Demon for Windows and Pulp Fiction for Mac OS X. Both of them cost money, but they both seem to be worth it. I’ve been using Feed Demon since November, and absolutely love it. I just started using Pulp Fiction tonight, but it’s already better than Shrook and NetNewsWire Lite. There’s a 15 day trial for PF, so I’d recommend checking it out.

Flash FXP is a terrific FTP client for Windows. I used to use CuteFTP and FTP Voyager, and Flash FXP is far better than both. Transmit was recommended on Whitespace a couple of months back for Mac OS X. I gave it a try, and I love it.

That’s enough promoting for tonight. I’m going to bed. G’nite.

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.

From what I can tell, it’s a pretty solid system. There are a few blogs who use it, and I like the idea of not having to rebuild static files. Other than that, I really don’t know much about it.

Has anyone had any experience with WordPress? Should I jump ship from MT to WP? Any feedback on it would be appreciated.

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?

From now on, RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0 feeds will contain summary posts, and the RSS 2.0 feed will contain full posts. That way, people can pick and choose which they want. My Atom feed contains both.

It’s pretty simple, I think. Those of you who subscribe to the Atom feed have the best of both worlds. I’m not sure if there is a news aggregator out there yet that can switch between summaries and full posts in Atom feeds, but I’ve filed a request with Nick Bradbury to add this functionality to Feed Demon. We’ll see what happens with this in the Feed Demon 1.1 Final.

Is this a good move? Should I change it back to all summaries? Let me know your thoughts.

The first thing I did was make it more error-friendly. If someone mistypes a feed URL, instead of seeing nonsense errors that have no value to the user, you get a simple error page that suggests that there was a problem with the feed, and to try a new feed URL.

The next thing I did was allow the user to skip the http:// protocol as long as there was a www. at the beginning of it. If the URL doesn’t have a www., then the http:// is required.

I also added support for the feed:// protocol. I did two things with this. Since the protocol is the same as http:// anyways (it’s designed to help feed readers subscribe a feed), I have the RSS Reader strip out the feed://, and replace it with http:// so that Magpie can parse it. The other thing I did was add an option to subscribe to a particular feed on that feed’s page (i.e. Zeldman). This should be fairly convenient.

Another thing that I’ve made an attempt to support is auto-detection of RSS feeds. Sites that have something along the lines of this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" »
	title="RSS" href="/rss/skyzyx.xml" />

It seems to work for some sites, but not for others. I’m still working on why the inconsistency exists, but I plan to have it worked out as soon as I get around to it. Some examples of sites that auto-detect are: The Daily Report, StopDesign, and Simon Willison. Some examples that don’t work are Superfluous Banter, Whitespace, and my own Skyzyx.com.

I’ve modified the user-agent string. To find out what it will return on your sites, load a valid feed, then check the source. I’ve noted it in the comments. Anyways, I hope that this tool is useful to someone.

Speaking of, what do you think about online RSS/Atom readers? Are they better or worse than desktop applications? What are some pros or cons of each?

Anyways, the only real problem I had with Feed Demon was that it didn’t properly parse the feed for Dunstan’s blog. I went back and looked at his XML, and he wasn’t using a <link> tag for his permalinks. He was using the <guid> tag instead. Hmmm…

I went and dug up the RSS 2.0 specification so that I could read up on the <guid> tag. The tags details say this:

If the guid element has an attribute named isPermaLink with a value of true, the reader may assume that it is a permalink to the item, that is, a url that can be opened in a Web browser, that points to the full item described by the <item> element.

That’s all fine and dandy, but Dunstan’s <guid> tag didn’t have that. Oh no! Was Dunstan’s XML feed not well-formed? *Gasp!* I read on, and came across this:

isPermaLink is optional, its default value is true. If its value is false, the guid may not be assumed to be a url, or a url to anything in particular.

Okay, okay. So Dunstan knows what he’s doing. Fair enough. But will my favorite feed reader never be able to properly read Dunstan’s Permalinks?

I submitted this as a bug report on the Feed Demon newsgroup last week. Today, Nick Bradbury released Feed Demon 1.1 Beta 1 (it kinda rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?). This issue is fixed in this release. Woo-hoo! There’s also basic support for Atom 0.3, which is kinda cool too.

I love the power of feedback.

• Afterdawn
• Ars Technica
• Brainstorms and Raves
• Branchleft
• Clagnut
• Design By Fire
• Design Meme
• Dooce
• IBeBloggin’
• Nick Bradbury
• OS News
• Plasticbag.org
• The Register
• Robot Johnny
• Sken.be
• Signal vs Noise
• Slorp!
• Something Normal
• Surfin’ Safari
• Textbased
• Think Secret
• Twenty4.org
• Wired News

I’ve also categorized them all into various sections. Each section has an OPML feed so that you can import any or all of these feeds straight into your RSS/Atom Reader.

The “Recent Posts” part of each blog listing displays the 3 most recent posts to each website. There is also a fourth option, “Read More »”, that allows you to read the RSS feed through the normal Skyzyx.com interface, via my RSS/Atom Reader. Simple, cool, easy.

Also, I know that I just gave it away, but I’ve added Really Stupid Atom Support to my installation of the Magpie RSS Parser. It now supports Atom 0.3 feeds, but I haven’t tested earlier Atom feeds. If anyone thinks Atom 0.2 or 0.1 support is worthwhile, contact me with a feed URL.

I’ve been asked about parsing RSS feeds for people who don’t have PHP. Since I don’t know Perl, and some people couldn’t use it anyways, I’ve begun writing an RSS/Atom parser in JavaScript. No ETA yet, but it’s on the way.

At one point, I made available the PHP code that I use to do it, once Magpie is already installed. If you do a search on this site, you can probably find it. I’ve been very happy with Magpie since I first began using it last summer. It was way better than the parser I’d written in JavaScript, and a lot faster too.

If you look at the left-hand menu, you’ll see that I’ve added an RSS News Reader section. This is much like the RSS section that I had a few months ago that ended up getting merged with the Blogs I Read section. The reader is also powered by Magpie, and I hope it does some people some good.

In an effort to better track who is reading this site (and who isn’t), I’ve moved the location of my RSS feed. You can get the current URL from the RSS section. I might even add more of a variety of feeds, depending on the response I get from people. I’ll play that one by ear.

Lastly, I’ve made some ever-so-slight adjustments to the order of the menu. If you don’t see a menu option where it normally is, look lower.

However, the two could definitely be better suited working together, so now they are. I’ve gotten rid of the “RSS Feeds” section but created an enhanced version of the “Blogs I Read” section. Each listing now lists the three most recent posts from each site. It’ll help keep things fresh to say the least.

So, how do you like it?

I also messed around with Onyx RSS, ProjectNeo™, and the Aggreg8 parsers. Magpie RSS Parser is just plain better.

I’ve also added an RSS/RDF Feed section, so that you can checkout/get other feeds from other sites. And if you’re one of the few people who targeted my RSS feed already, I’ve changed the URL from “skyzyx.xml” to “index.xml”. It just made more sense that way.