Saturday, June 4, 2011

Even better than expected

When you try doing something you’ve never done before, you expect things to go wrong. In the case of that SimplePie class I was talking about, the difficulty was just finding the correct download link. Once I had the correct link and the class was successfully installed, a quick test script I wrote actually worked first time (once I’d corrected a couple of silly typos).

The real test will come later, when I upload everything to the web server. But for anyone writing in PHP and needing to read RSS and Atom feeds, SimplePie is the tool I’d recommend.

Sadly, Twitter no longer supports an RSS feed, which you’d think would have been an obvious thing to support. You can get a little widget to embed on a web page, but it uses JavaScript to write it in, it’s clunky and it’s slow; and I can’t get it to integrate nicely with the design I have for the hub. The other alternative is to roll up my sleeves and get dirty with the Twitter API, something I have never done before. I’m not sure I want to.

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