dnews

√app«dnews

Web Developer News

Using PHP and MagpieRSS to present Dynamic News Feeds

In my ongoing quest to demonstrate how the resources I review using the drx application are both pragmatic and worthwhile, I present RSS News feeds for Web developers from a number of different sources, and in several categories. I tweak this list often, so stay tuned. Suggestions are also welcome.

Although wrapping dnews as an application object took a little work, the engine behind actually fetching the news items is the MagpieRSS PHP feed parser (via Expat). Magpie supports RSS 0.9x, 1.0, 2.0 and most Atom format feeds. Installing and getting it working was incredibly easy. The Magpie library is very simple to use, but be warned of the old adage “garbage in = garbage out,” meaning pick your sources carefully and check them out by hand before plugging the results into your own pages. This is especially important if you are using XHTML like I am, or you can easily break your site.

On the bright side, since the results are cached, once an update is fetched (by anyone, not necessary you), the items are displayed very quickly. Not only does this improve the quality of the user’s experience, it is also good practice in order to avoid hammering your sources with requests.

On an even brighter note, I spent approximately one afternoon implementing this application. In addition to MagpieRSS, Feedview and the RSS Feed Validator were also very useful while developing dnews. Enjoy.

By popular demand, I have published a document which describes how this application was built. Visit the Howto MagpieRSS tutorial for more information.

RSS Channel Selector

Ajaxian

1. Everything you wanted to know about String performance

Tom Trenka has detailed a great analysis of JavaScript performance across the various browsers. This is important work, and it reminded me of the JVM days where people tried to use pools and such&#8230; to find out that they were bad for performance as newer VM technology came out. When you try to be too [...]
Published: Mon, 12 May 2008 13:34:44 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/288695686/everything-you-wan...
2. Exclusive Mastering Dojo Chapters

Craig Riecke, Rawld Gill, and Alex Russell, along with the Pragmatic Programmers themselves have been kind enough to give the Ajaxian community some exclusive extracts from the Mastering Dojo beta book. What do we have on the docket? First, we have details on the Dojo DOM Apis. Specifically, the author takes us through a challenge involving interview [...]
Published: Sat, 10 May 2008 00:10:36 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/287177795/exclusive-masterin...
3. oEmbed makes embedding third party videos and images a bre...

Flickr, Viddler, Qik, Pownce and Revision3 are the first services to support oEmbed, an easy way to allow embeding media from a certain URL in a third party site. From the oEmbed site: oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to [...]
Published: Fri, 09 May 2008 11:33:53 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/286763082/oembed-makes-embed...
4. Processing.js: Port of the Processing language to JavaScri...

John Resig has completed 7 months of work to produce a port of Processing, the "programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design communities", which aims to teach the basics of computer programming in a visual context, and to serve as the foundation for electronic sketchbooks. One of [...]
Published: Fri, 09 May 2008 05:54:37 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/286603730/processingjs-port-...
5. Ajax Pioneer Week: Alex Russell of Dojo

Last, but never least, is Alex Russell of the Dojo Toolkit and SitePen. In Alex's five minutes of video footage for our JavaOne talk, he explained how Dojo enables you to built fantastic, responsive applications for everyone. The everyone piece revolves around accessibility too, which is core to Dojo thanks to work from Becky Gibson [...]
Published: Thu, 08 May 2008 16:51:33 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/286198963/ajax-pioneer-week-...
6. Growl for Windows and a Web Notification API

I have talked before about the desire for a Notification API on the Web. As a Mac user, I would love to see Growl from JavaScript, and there have been libraries written from as far back as protoGrowl. The difference is between a JavaScript API that does notifications on the desktop, versus trying to get [...]
Published: Thu, 08 May 2008 16:38:01 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/286190830/growls-for-windows...
7. File API via mountpoint://

If you 'aint got a URL scheme, you are a nobody. That is what I thought when I saw fx:// on the first day of JavaOne. The newest one of these that I have seen is mountpoint:// which is part of an Opera proposal for a File I/O API in the browser. You know me, extending [...]
Published: Thu, 08 May 2008 16:18:44 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/286178990/file-api-via-mount...
8. Location APIs: The Discussions

The Gears community is discussing a Geo Location API, which Aaron Boodman mentioned "was recently proposed to the W3C WebAPI group." Aza Raskin just posted today about Geolocation in Firefox and Beyond which covers his thoughts on an API. I thought it would be fun to look at the proposed APIs: Gears Examples PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: &#160; var geo = google.gears.factory.create&#40;'beta.geolocation'&#41;; &#160; // [...]
Published: Thu, 08 May 2008 13:09:55 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/286074460/location-apis-the-...
9. Wii Darts: Powering Ajax applications with Wii controllers

Ben and I gave a presentation at JavaOne on what's new with Ajax. Since this was JavaOne, we skewed a little more than we normally would to Java topics, and one of them was using the new Java Plugin, that has great new features such as being able to take a running applet out of [...]
Published: Wed, 07 May 2008 23:08:50 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/285655409/wii-darts-powering...
10. The seven rules of pragmatic progressive enhancement

I've been talking about progressive enhancement here before and got a lot of flak in comments about it. It seemed that there was a general misunderstanding of progressive enhancement and unobtrusive scripting as a "passing fad" or "backward facing rather than being innovative". I was asked by a design agency in London to go there [...]
Published: Wed, 07 May 2008 22:58:24 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/285683463/the-seven-rules-of...
11. Ajax Pioneer Week: John Resig of jQuery

John Resig got in front of the camera, and the projector, as he gives us his thoughts on the state, and future of Ajax. He starts out by discussing jQuery Core, and the features in the near term (1.2.4), short term (1.3) and beyond. He then delves into the UI side of the house with jQuery [...]
Published: Wed, 07 May 2008 18:14:52 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/285541056/ajax-pioneer-week-...
12. Lazily load functionality via Unobtrusive Scripts

David Kees has written about Using Prototype to Load Javascript Files, which is an implementation of the general technique of loading functionality via scripts based on the availability of DOM elements. He started using the technique to scratch an itch: The calendar on this site only appears on pages that show blog-related information. That calendar is enhanced [...]
Published: Wed, 07 May 2008 18:02:45 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/285539457/lazily-load-functi...
13. line-height: painful

Eric Meyer has felt a lot of pain due to line-height, which means us mere mortals are totally up the creak. He posted about how line-height is abnormal and goes into detail on his learning curve, and the pain he saw which lead him too: Why bring all this up? Because I went and poked line-height: [...]
Published: Wed, 07 May 2008 12:15:24 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/285330764/line-height-painfu...
14. Unobtrusive JavaScript with jQuery

Simon Willison gave another jQuery talk, this time at XTech, called Unobtrusive JavaScript with jQuery. In the presentation he delves into the reasons why you should go unobtrusive, how to use jQuery, and why they are a good match. Here is the presentation in full:
Published: Wed, 07 May 2008 11:10:02 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/285298139/unobtrusive-javasc...
15. Opera Dragonfly: New Web Tooling

Opera has posted what looks like a great new Web debugging tool Opera Dragonfly which is released in alpha. Debug JavaScript, inspect CSS and the DOM, and view any errors – Opera Dragonfly makes developing using Opera easier than ever, both on your computer and mobile phone. Shawn Lauriat has a nice write-up that tells the story: It [...]
Published: Tue, 06 May 2008 19:38:47 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/284855352/opera-dragonfly-ne...
16. Ajax Pioneer Week: Bruce Johnson of GWT

Today we have Bruce Johnson of the GWT team talking to us about GWT 1.5. He discusses the new features, such as the long awaited Java 5 language support, performance improvements, and much more. It is very nice to take an application, run it through the new GWT 1.5 compiler, and get an instantly faster running [...]
Published: Tue, 06 May 2008 14:27:37 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/284680786/ajax-pioneer-week-...
17. Porting Dojo Methods to Flash

Mike Wilcox has started a nice series of posts on porting Dojo methods to Flash as a homage for Open Screen (aside: I applaud Adobe's intentions, but need to see a non-assert of their IP before I can do anything with it.) In part one of the series Mike ports dojo.hitch to ActionScript: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: &#160; _global.lang = &#123; &#160; [...]
Published: Tue, 06 May 2008 12:12:27 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/284607870/porting-dojo-metho...
18. Details of button padding in various browsers

After building a slide deck with Ben, you learn the art of a perfectionist. He would love Chris Hester's posting on button padding that shows you how your buttons look on various browsers and operating systems. Even been frustrated when you try to style things on the Mac? Here are a few of his findings: IE 6 [...]
Published: Tue, 06 May 2008 11:32:01 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/284582474/details-of-button-...
19. IE and Windows XP Service Pack 3… still IE 6

Whenever I see a post on the IE Blog that has a title like IE and XP SP 3 I hope to see "oh, and IE 6 users will be upgraded". How much pain would be relieved when IE 6 usage is minimal? Unfortunately, I was disappointed again: XPSP3 will continue to ship with IE6 and contains [...]
Published: Tue, 06 May 2008 05:40:24 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/284415384/ie-and-windows-xp-...
20. Ajax Pioneer Week: Sam Stephenson of Prototype

We are having a special week at Ajaxian. Ben and I are giving an Ajax talk at JavaOne this week, and decided to put a little video from Ajax pioneers. As we worked out what we wanted to do, we asked the pioneers for a little time to do an interview. Although only a piece [...]
Published: Mon, 05 May 2008 16:16:35 GMT
URI:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/284032509/ajax-pioneer-week-...