RSS Aggregator

[earthlingzed]

I am going on a trip with some of my students, all of whom will be blogging as we travel (using blogger.com). I would like to build a little RSS aggregator that will show the latest posts from each student in one place. I am clear on how to parse RSS, but I would like some advice on how to go about listening for posts.

Advice in general about how to approach this problem or any examples/references are much appreciated.

Thanks!

[Merve]

I guess you could keep the PHP script constantly refreshing itself, but that might prove to be inefficient. That is best method I can think of.

[sherif_1]

why dont you just use something like newsgator or some rss reader?

it seams like a lot of work..

have a look at macromedia's dashbord it has a very funky rss reader

[earthlingzed]

Using a refresh is not going to work because the page would have to be running in a broswser at all times to continue teh server request.

How can you create a script that will run at intervals (on some predefined schedule perhaps) on a server?

[Merve]

on linux, using a cron job
on windows, the windows task scheduler

[AstroTeg]

You definitely can build a job to do this every X units of time.

Another approach is on each page load, check to see if you have a cached copy. If you do, check how old it is. If it isn't too old (say an hour), use the cached copy. If its too old or doesn't exist, then go out and fetch the latest RSS feed. Rinse and repeat for each site/blog. Problem here could be if you have too many sites you're checking in on and the amount of time it takes to load those feeds. For a dozen or so, I think you might be ok (of course, some testing will be needed).

You might look into Magpie RSS Parser. It'll handle the caching and fetching for you.