Magpie: A Simple Twitter Parser
I was recently looking into a parser for a Twitter RSS feed to output tweets onto a webpage. Most of the current solutions are all JavaScript based which I have issues with on the grounds that they don't embed the content in the website which means that with JavaScript turned off you won’t see the feeds. I suppose you could argue that a Twitter feed is hardly vital content but still if you’re going to put it on your site shouldn't it be available to everyone?
So this led me to begin looking for a server side script yet I failed to find one, although I'm sure they exist. So I thought this would be a good excuse to write a post on SimplePie, the RSS parsing framework. If you've never heard of SimplePie it's a very easy to use PHP class that will take any feed (Atom or RSS) and allow you to output its contents on a webpage.
Read MoreAll Encompassing HTML Bible
Just a quick post here as I was listening to the Boagworld Podcast the other day and they had an interview with Ian Lloyd about his work on the Sitepoint HTML reference guide. This all encompassing guide has just been released in ‘Beta’ format and I urge you to check it out.
From Pixels to Print
Print stylesheets are an excellent way of providing refined content to your readers without having to maintain multiple versions of the site. They can be used to eliminate unnessecary content such as sidebar links, navigation and graphical content unsuited to printing. To provide a visual companion to this article I have modified the print.css file for the Caribou theme that Nik is using for the Califonia Roadtrip microsite. I don’t want to go into too much detail here but rather outline some general guidelines and tricks I’ve picked up from the Web.
