LGF Technical Update
Charles Johnson
Mon Dec 4, 2006 at 7:10 pm PST • Views: 292
Yes, another one. I’ve been on a programming binge, taking a lot of my pre-existing procedural PHP and slowly, carefully transmuting it to nice shiny object oriented code. The latest section of the LGF Blog codebase to come under the microscope is the RSS feed reader, especially on the LGF News page. I’m giving a package called SimplePie a test run right now, and so far it looks good. Nice caching support and a very thorough API. (My homebrew parsing/caching routines, using PHP 4’s rather rudimentary XML support, were showing their age and getting increasingly difficult to maintain.)
Caching is important because in order to conserve bandwidth, most of the top news sites have limits on how often you’re allowed to access their RSS feeds. If you exceed the limit, your site is temporarily blocked. (I don’t blame them; I’d do the same thing.)
Frank says: