20120121 A hack to parse RSS feeds with php

Just happened to assemble this script hack recently, out of the requirement for a quick’n’dirty feed parsing feature: $feed_contents = file_get_contents($feed_url); $xml = simplexml_load_string($feed_contents, LIBXML_NOCDATA); $feed_array = json_decode(json_encode($xml)); print_r($feed_array); // Surprise!! Now this evidently is not SimplePie or Magpie RSS or whatever feed reader library tickles your fancy*, but assuming the feed will never be [...]

20111102 Breaking news: there’s an alternative to Google Reader

Tiny Tiny RSS. Here’s a demo. If you like it, you can install it in any server with PHP + (MySQL|PostgreSQL). If you like it a lot, you can enable the multiuser support and share your own online reader service with some friends. Then stop moaning worrying about Google datamining your interests or profiling your [...]

20071203 Reasons for using UTF-8

The subject on encoding is quite confusing and at the beginning one does never really know what are the differences between encoding types, and most importantly, what are the consequences of choosing ISO-8859 instead of UTF-8, so now that I begin to have more arguments than the Trust me, I think this is the right [...]