Parsing a Feed with PHP

Maybe this isn't such a big deal for many of you out there, but to me it's something of an accomplishment. Had I known it would be this easy, I would have explored this option way before now.

Upon learning PHP, I had to dig in to find out what all I could uncover with this new language. For the past several years, I've migrated toward the web side from mainframe development. Get it? It's like Internet double speak combining website with a reference to the dark side. Still don't get it? Okay, never mind.

So anyway, if you are learning PHP and want to see your code rendered, try out XAMPP. You can run it on your PC's localhost. This will allow you to run your PHP scripts without having to upload to a server on a hosted site.

Includes: Apache 2.4.9, MySQL 5.6.16, PHP 5.5.11, phpMyAdmin 4.1.12, OpenSSL 1.0.1, XAMPP Control Panel 3.2.1, Webalizer 2.23-04, Mercury Mail Transport System 4.63, FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.41, Tomcat 7.0.42 (with mod_proxy_ajp as connector), Strawberry Perl 7.0.42 Portable.

To all of my techie readers out there, try PHP to render RSS feeds from all your "fed" sites like Youtube, BBC News, Facebook, and your Blog. Of course, I haven't figured out the blog thingy just yet. I'm starting on a new adventure.

The instructions can get a bit hairy, but don't worry. If you perform all the steps exactly as written, it will all work out for you. I promise. I just ran some PHP code to grab and embed my last three uploaded videos from Youtube. It's all rendered in HTML at the end of the script with one simple line of code "echo $html;"

Published material has never been so easy to aggregate. Now that's progress! Don't you agree?




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