mypapit gnu/linux blog » Feedcreator

Planned Improvements on PHP FeedCreator-ppt (1.8.0)

mypapit — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 08:09:10 +0000

Sorry for the delay caused by my busy study schedule.

Now I would like to outline the planned improvements for the next feedcreator-ppt release 1.8.0 :

Improve ATOM 1.0 support
Fix HTML encoded description feature in ATOM and RSS feeds
Add manual, documentations and more examples
Add function to change timezone and encodings easily
Add standard podcast support
Fix various bugs in PIE,RSS,ATOM feed format

The new release of Feedcreator-ppt (1.8.0) is expected to come out in end of February 2007. You can get the latest development release from Feedcreator SVN server

Any Suggestions?
If you have any suggestions, feature request or bugs, please report them at Feedcreator Tracker at Sourceforge or put a comment here.

When you do, please include pieces of code that produces the feed, the resulting xml file itself and the version of feedcreator you’ve tested against (1.7.2-ppt or SVN) for easy debugging.

I would like to thank KosherJava and various other individuals that has submitted bug reports to improve feedcreator. Thank you, and and have a great Christmas holiday.

[tags]feedcreator,rss,atom,xml,feed,feeds[/tags]

Using Feedcreator to generate ATOM 1.0 feeds

mypapit — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 08:12:24 +0000

I’m going give out a tip on using feedcreator class library to ease up generating syndication feeds for your web project. As you might know, there are different kind of syndication format out there such as RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, RSS0.91, ATOM0.3 and ATOM1.0. Each of the syndication format has its own markup (though RSS 0.91 and 2.0 are closely related), making generating feeds from scratch can be quite a chore for your project.

Feedcreator provides an easy way to create RSS and ATOM feeds from within PHP using ease to use classes. However, feedcreator has a couple of drawback :

It does not support ATOM 1.0
Doesn’t support Enclosure
Can’t generate feeds on the fly

Though these drawbacks might not be as serious as I put in here, it is nice to have this features implemented on feedcreator. ATOM 1.0 is a new syndication format issued by IETF as a standard way to produce feeds, ATOM 1.0 has a nice features and more structured layout than the ever-inconsistent RSS feeds.

Though Enclosure tag is optional in RSS 2.0, the tag is significant for those who are into podcasting or photoblogging. Enclosure feature allows for the syndicated feed to not just serve text content, but also to package an enclosure (call it an attachment of some sort), as well. IIn the podcasting model, the RSS enclosure contains an audio file, which subscribers can listen to on their devices.

Generating feeds on the fly is one of the most requested feature of feedcreator. This allows feeds to be generated dynamically upon request as opposed to generating feed on certain event (such as posting new articles). Mambo and PhpGedView project uses modified Feedcreator to generate feeds on-the-fly.

I’ve published a modified version of Feedcreator (namely Feedcreator 1.7.2-ppt) that contains all of these enhancements (or hacks). Here’s a snippets on how to use the additional features :

/*


This demo is to illustrate how to use feedcreator

using outputFeed function, ATOM1.0 and enclosure

support.
Enclosure support is useful if you are into

podcasting or publishing photoblog.
the required parameter for enclosure is url, length

and type (as in MIME-type)
*/
< ? php

include ("include/feedcreator.class.php");
//define channel

$rss = new UniversalFeedCreator();

$rss->useCached();

$rss->title="Personal News Site";

$rss->description="daily news from me";

$rss->link="http://mydomain.net/";

$rss->syndicationURL="http://mydomain.net/$PHP_SELF";
//channel items/entries

$item = new FeedItem();

$item->title = "test berita pertama";

$item->link = "http://mydomain.net/news/somelinks.html";

$item->description = "hahaha aku berjaya!";

$item->source = "http://mydomain.net";

$item->author = "my_email@mydomain.net";
//optional enclosure support

$item->enclosure = new EnclosureItem();

$item->enclosure->url='http://mydomain.net/news/picture.jpg';

$item->enclosure->length="65905";

$item->enclosure->type='image/jpeg';
$rss->addItem($item);
//Valid parameters are RSS0.91, RSS1.0, RSS2.0, PIE0.1 (deprecated),

// MBOX, OPML, ATOM, ATOM1.0, ATOM0.3, HTML, JS
$rss->outputFeed("ATOM1.0");

//$rss->saveFeed("ATOM1.0", "news/feed.xml");

?>

You can download the modified version of Feedcreator 1.7.2 from my server, the zip package contains the modified class library, GNU/LGPL license, some demo php file and a diff file against the plain vanilla Feedcreator 1.7.2 for curious people.

p/s : all of the modifications are written by me except outputFeed function which is written by Fabian Wolf.

Download :
Feedcreator 1.7.2-ppt (zip)

Feedcreator website : http://www.bitfolge.de/rsscreator-en.html

RSS2PDF – Free Online RSS and Atom to PDF Generator

mypapit — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 23:34:31 +0000

I’ve discovered this website while on the internet, http://www.rss2pdf.com/. Like the title said, this website can turn any of your syndication feeds into pretty PDF documents. RSS2PDF also supports news feed auto-discovery making your life a little bit easier.

What can you do with RSS2PDF? Well for starters, the website itself has given some ideas to visitors on how to utilise them, such as creating comic PDF from any feed at Tapestry Comics, turn google news into pdf articles, and publish your blog feed into paper-based bulletin and transform your flickr photos in PDF style album. The choices are just limitless