Magpie RSS is an RSS parser available free from SourceForge.
It consists of a handful of scripts which sit on your site and creates a cache file which needs to be chmod’d to 755 or 777 – you may need to use your FTP tool to do that – or Magpie may do it for you.
So, what do you need to do?
This is the main page of a series (yet to be written) of How-To guides for adding RSS feeds to your website.
It’ll cover HTML and PHP scripted sites and all the tools will be free to use.
Why HTML? Well, some blogging systems and the Blogger sites don’t allow the user to add serverside scripts. Poop to them, but until they relax or allow some controlled way around it then those sites need to be treated as pure HTML.
| Method | Type | Cache | 3rd Party? | SEF | Score | Demo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Magpie RSS | PHP | Yes | No | Yes | 10 | here |
| DOMIT! RSS | PHP | Yes | No | Yes | 5 | here |
| CaRP | PHP | Yes | No | Yes | 4 | here |
| SimplePie | PHP | Yes | No | Yes | 10 | here |
If you’ve read this blog before you’ll know that I’ve just launched RealState and am building up the functionality. It’s early days, and the domain is sandboxed so I’m not terribly anxious about how much traffic it gets – not yet anyway!
But I was thinking that I should put WebAnalyse onto it so that I have some tracking and I stumbled over another blog talking about Google Analytics. I shuddered at the thought of Google getting into the hitcounter game, it seemed like such a backward step. And I usually like to control my data but Google is trusted, surely they won’t shut up shop and leave me statistics-less?
Rollyo have released a workable form of their search tool. I found it first looking for a custom search engine and their tool is one step in the right direction. It’s really only good for having a search between grouped sites, or between friends (with a limit of 25 sites per rollyo group) – but it’s a bit of fun. Here’s mine:
I’ve been wanting to have a play with AJAX for ages and had book marked Rasmus’ 30 second AJAX Tutorial so tonight I took 30 seconds, which turned into 30 minutes and had a play.
I’ve extended his example slightly – to include a javascript fix and to make it a bit more browser safe – because I have Opera 7 as my test browser and it doesn’t work, but does for Opera 8 (apparantly).
Adsense for Search (AFS) is the system where you have a Google search box on your site to present targetted ads. Personally I don’t see the attraction but plenty do.
I’ve become aware of an interesting scenario this week exploiting Adsense for Search, one way was smart and I liked it. The other was pure spam.
It’s sometimes necessary to submit a form using javascript rather than by using the normal serverside validation (or as well as). This is a handy example of how to do it…