Wednesday Night RSS Diversion
The solution remains elusive, as I try to decide on the best RSS parsing library. Short reviews of the top candidates:
* SimplePie: powerful but bloated. 277K (newly-released v1.0) is way too much code just to show headlines with popup descriptions. Atomization is where it’s at. This is globular.
* PEAR’s XML_RSS class. Decent, but the parsing routines are not forgiving enough of clueless bloggers and/or MSM organizations who incorrectly set up their RSS feeds.
* MagPieRSS: currently testing and leaning towards this one. Enough modularity to let me implement my own MySQL caching solution, reasonably forgiving of bloggers who insist on including curly quotes in their <title> nodes, reasonably compact, and reasonably fast. One tenth the size of the simplepie.inc library. This is good.
And now that I’ve thoroughly confused our non-techie readers, here’s the Wednesday open thread…




