Pulling in RSS to your Website

March 2, 2009 at 10:34 am · Filed under Code

Chris Coyier of css-tricks.com posted a nice screencast of how to use SimplePie. SimplePie allows you to pull in pretty much any RSS feed from another website and post that info on your site in regular HTML.

I’ve been playing around with the options and abilities this last weekend and I feel it’s the easiest way to get some RSS content onto a website. I know SimpleXML is supposed to be really simple, and perhaps my limited understanding of PHP classes has held me back, but I’ve never gotten SimpleXML to work for me in under 5 minutes. SimplePie literally works about as fast as you can type 20 short lines of code. It’s practically fool proof.

I certainly recommend checking SimplePie out.

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Creating Your Own Blog with PHP and MySQL Tutorial

August 1, 2008 at 8:40 am · Filed under Code

Ever wanted to create a simple blog without needing to do the whole WordPress deal? Maybe you just want to create something on your local machine for your own personal use. Heck, coding your own blog is also a good way to show a potential employer that you have at least some coding chops.

Well, I’m going to attempt to help the absolute beginner create just that. I myself am no PHP expert, but I’ve managed to learn enough that I think I could help other beginners. I’m sure some of the ways that I’m coding things are not necessarily the best possible method, but I’m open to comments and suggestions. I’m learning too, after all.

So what type of sections will these posts cover? Well as of right now this is my plan (I’m sure it’ll change soon):

  • Installing a server on your local machine
  • Creating your database and tables
  • Connecting your PHP pages to the database
  • Setting Privileges
  • Creating the various pages (front page with loop, individual posts etc.)
  • Creating the forms for content entry
  • Post tagging
  • Integrating Tiny MCE for content entry
  • Allowing simple user comments
  • Creating a tag cloud
  • Working with excerpts (both automatic and custom)
  • Uploading images to your server

Some things I’d like to include but will won’t necessarily includes user logins, admin logins, and security.

I’m going to assume then that you know basic (X)HTML at the very least. Minimal CSS knowledge will also help in a few spots.

I’m hoping this will help other beginners get over some of the bumps and hitches that I’ve experienced more quickly than when I was facing with them.

I have no exact timeline for when these posts will come out, but my plan will be to post at least once a week.

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