Use PHP to display any RSS feed on your site Sep18 '07

Over the years, I've struggled with ways to include external content on this site, without having to use JavaScript or Flash "widgets," which are convenient but can be troublesome.

I even got philosophical and preached that external content should remain external - relative to it's domain.

Despite all this, occasionally I'll want to display some content from another site, such as my Twitter updates, or my Google Reader Shared links.

With PHP 5, it's very easy to include external content onto your site. This tutorial will explain how to display the contents of an RSS feed directly into your site's HTML markup.

The benefits of parsing external content are:

1. You're not stuck with whatever "badge" or "widget" they provide you, which is often hard to customize to match your own site's design and layout.
2. The content you display is accessible by search engines, since it actually becomes part of your site, helping to increase relevancy and page-rank. ("Widget content" is often invisible to search engines.)
3. Page loading speed is not affected.

RSS feed

First, find the RSS feed URL for the content you'd like displayed on your site. For this example, we'll use my latest Twitter updates RSS feed:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/122933.rss

Below is an example "node" of this RSS feed:

<item> <title>Matthom: I've come to the conclusion there is no one-stop-shop browser.</title> <description>Matthom: I've come to the conclusion there is no one-stop-shop browser.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:53:35 +0000</pubDate> <guid>http://twitter.com/Matthom/statuses/276870562</guid> <link>http://twitter.com/Matthom/statuses/276870562</link> </item>

PHP

With PHP, we can parse this information, and display it in a format more comfortable to us, such as a list item:

• Matthom: I've come to the conclusion there is no one-stop-shop browser.

Using basic cURL syntax, we'll loop through each <item> element from the RSS feed, and display it as an HTML unordered list:

# INSTANTIATE CURL. $curl = curl_init(); # CURL SETTINGS. curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/122933.rss"); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 0); # GRAB THE XML FILE. $xmlTwitter = curl_exec($curl); curl_close($curl); # SET UP XML OBJECT. $xmlObjTwitter = simplexml_load_string( $xmlTwitter ); $tempCounter = 0; foreach ( $xmlObjTwitter -> item as $item ) { # DISPLAY ONLY 10 ITEMS. if ( $tempCounter < 11 ) { echo "<li><a href=\"{$item -> guid}\">{$item -> title}</a></li> "; } $tempCounter += 1; }

Result

This code will loop through each RSS feed <item>, and output my last ten Twitter updates as an HTML unordered list:

<ul> <li>Matthom: I've come to the conclusion there is no one-stop-shop browser.</li> <li>Matthom: At the iTunes store.</li> <li>Matthom: @MattsShell - We should go to Jewel and pick some up.</li> <li>Matthom: Collective Soul - Georgia Girl</li> <li>Matthom: woo chilly!</li> <li>Matthom: Suppose to be 85 so am wearing shorts again</li> <li>Matthom: heading out the door.</li> <li>Matthom: I need to start buying some frozen lunch meals</li> <li>Matthom: Is it only Tuesday?</li> <li>Matthom: Going to eat. Tacos!</li> </ul>

• Matthom: I've come to the conclusion there is no one-stop-shop browser.
• Matthom: At the iTunes store.
• Matthom: @MattsShell - We should go to Jewel and pick some up.
• Matthom: Collective Soul - Georgia Girl
• Matthom: woo chilly!
• Matthom: Suppose to be 85 so am wearing shorts again
• Matthom: heading out the door.
• Matthom: I need to start buying some frozen lunch meals
• Matthom: Is it only Tuesday?
• Matthom: Going to eat. Tacos!

Nice, clean, and looks like it comes straight from my own database.

Other resources

• Paul Stamatiou: How To: Parse XML with PHP5.

Categories: Code , PHP , RSS , Tutorials , Web Development , XML

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