I recently decided to freshen the Library Systems Office website, planning to integrate a few headlines from this weblog & add a few new RSS feeds. I was using some old PHP code to display a couple of RSS feeds from the Sophos anti-virus sites and thought it would just be a matter of cut & paste to add a few more feeds. Wrong.
The code I was using wasn’t handling the XML correctly…well, it was handling it OK but HTML code was passing through and displaying as non-functional markup. So I had to update my RSS parsing software…which lead me to google which sent me on to SourceForge where I found magpieRSS.
If you have PHP enabled on your webserver, it’s a piece of cake to install. One very nice feature is that the magpie parser will cache results when drawn from an RSS feed…so until it changes, you reduce latency on the feeds you’re displaying (e.g., the page loads faster!).