Displaying
An RSS Feed On Your Website Using PHP And MagpieRSS
Displaying An RSS Feed On Your Website Using PHP And MagpieRSS
These days everybody wants to have fresh content on their web
site. Search engines like to see dynamic web pages, where the content
is updated on a regular basis. Static pages that have information
that doesn't change are not only boring, but less likely to be visited
by a search engine spider than a page that changes every time it
is displayed.
By using RSS and the MagpieRSS toolkit, you can import data from
another web site or news source and display that information on
your own site.
First, download the MagpieRSS kit from http://magpierss.sourceforge.net.
Next, unpack the archive, into a directory off your root on your
web site called "rss".
Then, create a directory off your root called "cache".
CHMOD this directory to 777.
You'll need to know the URL for the feed that you want to display.
You can find this by searching for "RSS feed" in Google,
or by going to one of the many sites that allow you to search thrown
various sources for feeds. Syndic8.com is one, for example.
To display data from a single source, you can use code similar
to this:
require_once('rss/rss_fetch.inc');
$news_feed = '';
error_reporting(E_ERROR);
$rss = fetch_rss("http://www.url-of-the-rss-feed.com");
$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0);
foreach ($items as $item )
{
$news_feed .= '' . $item['title'] . '' . $item['summary'] . '';
}
echo $news_feed;
MagpieRSS not only decodes the data, but it will also cache the
data so it will retrieve news articles only once per hour.
Utilizing RSS in this fashion will allow your web site to have
fresh content displayed constantly, and will (hopefully!) keep the
search engine spiders interested in your site. The more the spiders
index your site, the more pages you will have listed in the search
engines. And with more pages listed in the search engine indexes
you have a much better chance of attracting people to your web site.
About the Author Copyright © 2005
by Mikel Beck.
About the Author: Mikel Beck is the owner of a number of web sites,
the latest being The Happy Hour Pub. http://www.happyhourpub.com
|
