RSS ?

Anon

What does RSS stands for ? How do I add this kind of utility to my web site, like this one PHPBuilder is using where we can post comments to colums, tips, etc. Is there any library available ? Where can I download that ?

thank you

Anderson

Anon

RSS = Rich Site Summary. It is an xml-based standard originated by Netscape for syndicating site-specific information -- usually headlines that may link back to the site.

For creating an RSS file, the format is quite obvious and I found it simple enough to just make a representation of it and embed PHP calls to dump data out of a database into the right buckets. See http://stonemountain.yi.org/rss.php for an example; the data is dynamically delivered of of the Prattle message board database.

For decoding an RSS file and doing something useful, there are a couple of routines in the code snippet library (follow the link at left) that depend on the XML parser.

The format is easy to bang on with regular expressions, too -- awhile back I wrote code to fetch RSS files, format the data to my liking, and cache the results for my personal homepage, http://www.yelvington.com/. You can see the underlying code here:

http://yelvington.com/headlines.php3

Anon

Steve I appreciate your help. I would like to ask you if I need any module for parsing XML and RSS files under Apache, for example. And I´d like to know how do you, in your page that I visited, coded those posts that users can post, separetly for each article that you wrote. I have an Idea on how to code it, but maybe your way can be more general than mine. PHPBuilder also uses this tool. Is there any library available for this porpouse ? I think that it would be a LOT interesting for my web site and I´d like to use it there !

thank you 🙂

Anon

PHP can be compiled to include James Clark's expat routines, which implement an event-driven XML parser. There are some examples of how to use that in the code snippet library and I believe there also is a column here on phpbuilder showing how it's done.

I haven't taken that route. I wrote my RSS tool when I was using a Web hosting company that didn't support the XML parser, so I implemented mine through brute force: lots of regular expressions.

On the second question: I have some code here:

http://yelvington.com/annotate.php3

... that illustrates a very simple, file-based method for allowing users to post comments on Web pages.

I've written (or more accurately, I am writing) a full-fledged discussion system based on PHP and MySQL, which you can see here:

http://stonemountain.yi.org/

... but it is much more complicated than the annotation code.