I don’t think I’ve changed my home page in 5-10 years. Up until a few days ago, it featured long lists of quotes which I stopped collecting sometime in high school (although Google searchers did seem to stumble on them). It needed to be updated, and I didn’t want to spend time updating a web page that doesn’t serve much purpose.
It dawned on me that I actually do a lot of stuff online that’s publicly accessible – write in this blog, bookmark stuff with del.icio.us, mark stuff as public in my feed reader, etc. So, I updated my home page to be a rolling collection of the stuff I’ve most recently updated online in various areas. That way, the content never gets stale. I don’t really like how it looks, but I like it better than the old page, so it’s good enough for now.
It’s a single PHP page that uses the SimplePie RSS library. I was using MagpieRSS for a while, and I found it much easier to use than SimplePie (ironic?), but it threw too many errors and warnings that I didn’t feel like troubleshooting.
Well there goes the “Too Many Toms” image. Noooo!
I put it on MySpace just for you.
As one of the developers of SimplePie, I’d be interested in your thoughts about it — particularly what makes Magpie simpler/SimplePie harder to use. Additionally, I’d like to know what all you’re looking for in a feed parser, as well as what you’re not looking for (or don’t want). Send me an email when you have time, because I’d really like to hear back from you. Thanks!
This is the biggest example of what was easy in MagpieRSS, and I found hard (and later learned impossible) with SimplePie:
http://simplepie.org/support/viewtopic.php?id=314
Conceptually, it was easy for me to look at the xml and tell magpie “I want that attribute” and with SimplePie I needed to look up the function names for the attributes, ultimately finding that I’m now limited to the functions provided.