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.

Categories: PHP, Twitter, RSS, SimplePie