Tag: xml

March 6, 2006 / PHP & Web Development

vBulletin’s inbuilt RSS feeds

A great many vBulletin forum owners appear to be unaware that their forums can provide an RSS feed “out of the box”.

This is a great shame because it limits the forums ability to grow and have visibility.

Now the naysayers will say one of two things

  1. I don’t want people stealing my content
  2. I want people to visit the forum and if they use feeds they might not (usually because of ad revenue)

The reality is that there are a great many forums out there all competing for the same users and you need to use every competitive advantage there is. In vBulletin it’s things like allowing users to subscribe to daily digests of posts to a forum. Pretty much the same thing result as an RSS feed but it’s turned on by default and forum owners don’t proactively turn it off.

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December 13, 2005 / PHP & Web Development

Using CaRP

CaRP is a “Caching RSS Parser“, thus it’s name. It comes in a variety of flavours but I tested the free version.

The only problem I had was that my host had safe mode turned on and that caused some problems in the “installation” – creating the cache folders but the manual instructions did the trick.

The scripts come with an install and example page. To get real value check their online examples which show how you can combine two feeds and take the most recent, for example.

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December 13, 2005 / PHP & Web Development

Using DOMIT! RSS

I’ve worked with DOMIT! because it’s part of the Mambo and Joomla CMS systems so I expected this to be a doddle. Sorry, it wasn’t. There were 2 undefined constants and one code defect which all took time to identify.

There is no doubt that the code in DOMIT! is far more exhaustive than that of Magpie but, really, you don’t need it if all you’re planning to do is parse an RSS onto a webpage.

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September 21, 2005 / Directory Management

Automated Directory Submissions

Every day there are new directories being created and keeping up with them can be quite a trial. If you have a series of sites that you submit then adding them manually can be a bit of a struggle.

Solution: have a generic descriptor file for sites to identify the main sections of the site that might be submitted to a directory.

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June 6, 2005 / PHP & Web Development

Dates on Google Sitemaps

June 5, 2005 / PHP & Web Development

Google Sitemaps – the end of the compromise?