One of the features I plan to put into geektyme.org will be an RSS aggregator to pull in feeds from “member sites” – i.e. sites I host, SVN repositories, the forum, blogs. At this point I’m trying to decide in what manner I want to implement the aggregator; I can either do it via PHP or AJAX/Javascript, some combination of booth, or use one of the various solutions already available instead of writing it from scratch. First I decided to look into using PHP, and since Dreamhost is good enough to have PHP 5 running on my host system, I went with SimpleXML to attempt to parse the data.
It quickly became obivious that I’d have to find another solution, as trying to open a remote URL via SimplXML’s simplexml_load_file function ended in a configuration issue: Dreamhost doesn’t allow PHP to make load calls on URL’s. If it’s a local file there’s no issue, but since I’m going to be pulling via URL this doesn’t seem to be a viable option. I’m going to keep researching a way to do it with PHP, but in the end I may just end up using something like Google’s AJAX Feed API. Anyone have experience parsing RSS feeds or using the AJAX Feed API?
Work on the design continues unabated, or to some degree. I’ve been using The GIMP to design it out, creating all the images for the elements, backgrounds and so forth. Once I have all the elements done I’m going to pull the layers apart (each element has it’s own layer in the .xcf file) and cut them up – most can be tiled on the X or Y axis, so they will be made into 1px images to decrease the sites load time.
Maybe I’m just a minimalist, but it’s my opinion that you should never use a larger image than is necessary, and always reduce your images to the smallest possible size (dimensions, at least – never sacrifice image quality). I think people have been spoiled by the broadband revolution, causing sites to become large and bloated. In my opinion, web developers/designers should consider speed and design as equals on the priority list – but on that same list, both would be trumped by the need to stick to standards (although, doing so should help speed and design).
But I digress, hopefully I will have another take up shortly for everyone to look at and criticize (please do). I’m on vacation from work the last week in August, so I plan to have the design aspects finished by then so I can spend some time that week coding – seriously coding.
