This is a followup to my Simplepie post a while back. YouTube offers Atom feeds, great – you’d think. However the data that YouTube outputs in its Atom feeds is…a bit different to what you might expect from a standard RSS feed in that it contains a lot of escaped HTML. Essentially for each item’s descripton in the feed YouTube outputs something like the following:

<div style=”font-size: 12px; margin: 3px 0px;”><span></span></div></td>
<td style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 1.4em; padding-left: 20px; padding-top: 1px;” width=”146″ valign=”top”><div><span style=”color: #666666; font-size: 11px;”>From:</span>
<a href=”http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=YouTube”>YouTube</a></div>
<div><span style=”color: #666666; font-size: 11px;”>Views:</span>
15774</div>

Which is basically a div that contains a table and is pretty intrusive if included in it’s native form. A rough and ready solution to just getting the bits you want (or at least I want) is to grab each … Read More »

Wow, how’s that for a snappy blog title!

Ok, I realise it sounds slightly dull but utilising RSS feeds can be a useful and relatively straight-forward way to include dynamic information within a site.

I’ve searched far and wide for various RSS integration tools and my favourite is by far and away a RSS parsing class written in php called Simplepie (http://simplepie.org/). Although this hasn’t been developed since version 1.2 was released in 2009 it remains the most straightforward and robust solution I’ve found.

Once you’ve downloaded and included the simplepie.inc file it’s so simple (excuse the pun) to use (here is a very good tutorial on how to set up a simple page featuring one feed). If you want to include multiple feeds there is some helpful info here.

But this is the best solution … Read More »

I’ve never really paid a huge amount of attention to Flickr, and even less to the Flickr API. I’ve had to rectify this recently as a site I’m working on needs to have an easily updatable slideshow as a fairly prominent element.

Flickr was the platform that we decided to go with to upload the photos to due to the fact it’s pretty nice and easy to use and there are a huge range of pre-existing apps etc that you can exploit to do pretty much anything you can imagine.

Flickr provides a standard way of embedding photos/photostreams, although it is via an i-frame, is fairly clunky and not very customisable – it also looks pretty crap if you want to make it sit with the rest of the site’s design. I explored various methods of calling the relevant photostream to the … Read More »

I’m redeveloping the Jane Tomlinson Appeal site, giving it a bit of a freshen up re look & layout and am also developing a php/mysql-based cms to manage it.