MagpieRSS is a very popular script that provides an XML-based (expat) RSS parser in PHP. However, it doesn’t support attribute access by default. The good news is that the developers at MagpieRSS have been working on a patch release to support uniform access to attributes. In fact MagpieRSS 0.8 was released briefly as a DEV build. However, I am unable to find any working link to download the build.
MagpieRSS works well for existing RSS feeds. However, when dealing with Podcast feeds, it’s unable to look up attribute values in the enclosure tag.
Thanks to Jude Venn and Mike Krus, they have provided a patch to access the attribute values. Here is how:
- Download the patched version of rss_parse.inc.
- Replace the current rss_parse.inc with the downloaded patch. (the file is located in magpierss directory)
- Access attributes in your script as follows
Posted in Blogging, PHP |
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This is a follow up story to the previous article.
After my normal internet connection was lost due to a malfunctioning Ethernet adapter (Damn you SMC), I had to resort to other means in order to stay plugged in. So I turned to WAP.
For those of you unfamiliar with WAP…what the hell are you doing on a tech blog, just kidding!
WAP is “Wireless Application Protocol”, an emerging standard to allow cellular/wireless devices to access the Internet. In plain English, it’s internet for cell phones.
One of the important things that I gained from this experience is that i had the chance to use WP.com’s mobile website m.wordpress.com designed specifically to offer mobile users easier access and better blogging experience.
Of course, this page cannot replace the WP Dashboard, but nonetheless it offers key elements of it. From there, you can get a quick Stats summary, Add new articles and Add new bookmarks to your blogroll.
One of the problems that I had with posting articles is the absence of the conformity offered by WP rich text editor; witch meant that I had to add my own html tags. So here’s what I did. I have Qumana a blogging tool, installed on my computers. What Qumana offers, is the ability to see the source of the text you wrote in the WYSIWIG panel, just like the Visual and Code panels in the WordPress dashboard. Of course there are a number of programs that has this feature like Dreamweaver and FrontPage. So what I did was that I wrote the text and copy/pasted the code and saved it to file, then I sent the file to my Cell phone witch luckily support copy/pasting, witch enabled me to post the formatted article.
And here’s some more good news, m.wordpress.com can accessed from any normal web browser. At the moment I’m writing this article from it using Mozilla Firefox. This can enable a hell of a lot faster posting then using the real dashboard.
Try it yourself
Posted in Blogging, Cell Phones |
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I logged into WordPress.com mobile dashboard using my mobile phone, and I’m trying to test if i can blog from here. This way i can write my articles on a pc and copy/paste them here.
Update: it worked, this is great news, i can be more active now from my cell phone, i’ll write a small report about this feature later on
Posted in Blogging, Cell Phones |
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Google webmaster tools, is a service provided by Google to give webmasters more information about Google Bot’s behavior towards their website/blogs, how they rank up within the search engine and alert them about the errors that faces the crawler when trying to crawl their pages.
Webmaster Tool requires each user to verify his ownership to each website added to his account.
Google offer two methods of verification:
1-Adding a meta tag to the source of your index page.
2-Uploading an html page to website’s root, with a specific name provided by Google.
Any WordPress.com user will quickly realize that WP.com does not allow editing source files, or uploading any pages to your blog.
What do you do? How do you verify your blog?
The answer is very simple:
1-Open your Webmaster Tools Dashboard.
2-Select the WordPress.com blog and click on the Verify option.
3-In the verification list, chose the “Upload an HTML file”, You’ll be asked to upload a page with specific name (ex: googlee09df14b32e62ffc.html) copy the file name.
4-Open your WordPress.com Blog Dashboard and click the Write button.
5-Select the Page option to create a new page.
6-In the title paste the file name you copied in step 3.
7-Go back to your Webmaster Tools Dashboard again and try to verify your blog again….TATA
Posted in Blogging |
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