15 Minutes before bedtime!

I’ve been working on my website all day, and I have managed to almost finish three out of my list of seven things to work on my website.

If any of you were lucky enough to be visiting my website more than five minutes ago then you would of seen “(new)” at the end of the title of every web page. That is because I have replaced the PHP classes I have used to create the site layout with three simple includes. There is only one part left to go and that is the blog, but thats next!

The next two changes are on the homepage.
One, I have got rid of the “Whats New” section.
And two, I have replaced my RSSread PHP program with some PHP to include the latest blog entries straight from the database!

I’ll post more details about changes as and when I complete them!
Till next time, see you!

Five minutes left till bedtime now, and the subscriptions plugin is working, but it sends an email even if I edit a post!

RSSread Version 2

This is just some ideas that I have about new features in the next release of RSSread

  1. Cache. The next release will have a cache. If the feed doesn’t load, it’ll load from the cache.
  2. Templates. This is a biggie, and will define how feeds are displayed on the screen.
  3. Category Sorting. If a feed has categories, then RSSread will either sort items by categories, or only display certain categories.
  4. Multiple feeds in one. Combine multiple feeds into one display.
  5. Multiple config files. Load different config files for different feeds and/or pages
  6. Support for different feed types, for example, Atom, RDF, RSS 0.92. These will be kept as separate modules, and added to as new formats come along, or old ones are updated.

Some of these features I was thinking about in the last release. For example, templates is in v1, but it is only basic; multiple config files, it is in its basic format, ie, changing settings by calling a function.

The other features, are either requests, or ideas I have had about what should be included.

I haven’t yet started development of version 2, that will start late 2006, early 2007, and will probably be released sometime in mid to late 2007

Update RSSread to 1.5

RSSread 1.5 fixes a couple of bugs that were discovered by Luis.

Some links in the feed weren’t being parsed correctly if they included a “&” (&) character.
This only becomes apparent if the value of the tag is not wrapped in a <![CDATA[]]> tag.
This is due to the way xml_parse() handles special characters like “&” (&)

I have also fixed a couple of bugs that might occur for the other tags.

You can download the updated version from:
http://downloads.roganty.co.uk/?get=/rss_read
-Or-
http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2831.html

Instructions for updating your version of RSSread can be found in this post here

Update RSSread to 1.4

RSSread 1.4 fixes a bug that effects the layout of posts when viewed with no shortening

It is down to a little spelling mistake, that I haven’t noticed before now.
In three places i used “nr” instead of “rn” which caused single new lines not to show up, whereas double new lines (or more) would not display the proper number of new lines.

In this release another bug is fixed in posts when viewed with shortening enabled.
This bug only became apparent when the previous bug was fixed, and it is to do with some of the for loops in the shortenPost() function.

You can download the updated version from:
http://downloads.roganty.co.uk/?get=/rss_read
-Or-
http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2831.html

Rename your original rss_read.class.php as something else, for example old_rss_read.class.php and then extract the new rss_read.class.php file into the same folder.
You will now need to open both files in a text editor of your choice, and start copying any of the variables that you changed from the old file into the new one.
Now save the new file and close the text editor.
Browse to the page that includes/uses RSSread to verify that your settings are still the same.
Weldone, you have now updated RSSread, and moved all of your settings over to the new version.
If there are any differences, you will need to double check that the variables in the new file have been over writen with the variables from the old file.

Muliple Style Sheets

If you are reading this on my homepage using Firefox, well done!
Go to the “View” menu then select “Page Styles”, you can then choose a style for my site.
Its not yet permanent, as it resets to default every time you move to a new page.

If your reading my blog and you thought WTF!? Then calm down, just go to my website at www.roganty.co.uk and everything will be explained.
I am using RSSread on my homepage and the previous three posts from my/this blog is displayed on the homepage

RSSread released!

My latest pet project, RSSread, has been released, though it is still being worked on.

RSSread has been incorporated into my homepage.
So this post and any new ones will also be shown on my homepage.

All of this has been done by reading the XML file which is produced by my blog, this means that any RSS feeds can be read by my script, as long as they are XML files.
The script can be configured in a number of different ways which can be found on the example page
It is actually only the example page which is still being worked on, but because this file is being included in the zip file, I have not yet properly released RSSread.

I will post more details in a few days time when I have finished the example page