RSS Feed Script

[Andy]

Here is a simple way to include an RSS feed in your web page using PHP:

First you need to download some code from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/magpierss/

Then here is some simple PHP code to include on a page to show the feed:

Code:

<?php
require_once 'rss_fetch.inc';

$url = $_GET['url'];

$rss = fetch_rss($url);

echo "Site: ", $rss->channel['title'], "<br />
<ul>
";
foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
$title = $item[title];
$url   = $item[link];
echo "<li><a href=$url>$title</a></li>
";
}
?>
</ul>

the feed is specified in the GET variable i.e. rss-script.php?url=http://feedlink

or you could hard code it like: $url = "http://feedlink";

[Andy]

The code I posted to get hold of a feed and display on your site does more than just grab the feed, it caches the feed on your site so your page is quick to load after the first feed download and you don't overburden the feed server to annoy them.

Producing your own RSS feed is really easy, it's just a matter of providing a simple XML page and linking to it from say an RSS feed icon on your page.

There is a good tutorial on how to do it here: http://www.xul.fr/en-xml-rss.html

I went a step further and wrote php code to generate my XML file from a database.

To call the PHP script from a request for the XML file I used .htaccess (available on Apache server hosting) as follows:

Code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^feed.xml$ feed.php

This runs the code in feed.php thats spits out the source text of the xml file but the feed reader sees a file called feed.xml

No I don't want to reveal my code for feed.php 

If you don't run a blog (where RSS feeds are a standard component) it makes sense to include an RSS feed on your home page with updates and news from your site so visitors may subscribe to your feed which is more powerful than simply bookmarking your site.

You can see my feed here:

http://initialtraffic.com/feed.xml

View the source in your browser to see how simple the file is. You could create your own one in a text editor and save it to your site as feed.xml then link to it via a hypertext link.