I decided to write a basic blog aggregator using PHP and mySQL at the weekend, which is now on my website:
https://oracle-base.com/aggregator/index.php
I created a couple of tables in a mySQL database, wrote a few lines of PHP and “Bob’s your uncle”, as they say. I’m not sure if it will stay, but I thought is was worth a few minutes of my time to play around with it, just for the experience.
By far the most time consuming part of the job was writing the XML parser so that it was able to deal with all the formats of blogs I currently read (RSS, ATOM and RDF). Even within these formats, there are variations on tag names and date formats. It’s a real pain in the ass.
Just like everything else in IT, you take a simple idea (RSS), then let it diverge into a monster…
Cheers
Tim…
