Albright Posted December 15, 2006 Share Posted December 15, 2006 My current project, and the first PHP project I hope to eventually make a serious profit from, is called SigFeeder. It's a tool which captures the headlines from peoples' blogs via RSS and makes an image out of them. It's intended that people can put that image in their signatures when they post on forums, so that others can see what the latest headlines in their blog is, and click on it to go to the blog if they're interested. For example, here's the "SigFeed" for the official SigFeeder blog:[url=http://sigfeeder.com/Blog/][img]http://sigfeeder.com/f/1.png[/img][/url]This might look a bit familiar... Browsing through this forum, I saw many posts by "SharkBait" who has something similar in their sig, so clearly I'm not the only one to have this idea. (SharkBait, if you're reading this... Did you hack that together yourself, or do I have a competitor somewhere?)Anyway, the site is built in what should be fully compliant XHML and CSS, and just yesterday I got all the IE 6 workarounds implemented, so it should look good in any modern browser.I'll be the first to admit I'm not an artist, though, so I'm not looking for suggestions with regard to the appearance so much as the function. So if any of you have a blog and could sign up for an account and test things out for me, I'd greatly appreciate it. (If you want to test the premium features, let me know what email address you signed up with and I'll upgrade your account.)For the coding, we're lookin' at PHP 5, with a good deal of OOPness going around. I used the Smarty templating engine; I can't imagine how I ever coded without it. Database stuff is handled with SQLite via PDO (see my so-far-unanswered [url=http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php/topic,118658.0.html]thread about the security implications[/url] of this). I wrote my own code to handle the RSS by using SimpleXML; at first I tried using RSS parsing libraries like Magpie, but they were too inflexible or bulky for my needs. (And, ho boy, PHP's standard non-"simple" XML handling features are a nightmare.) Please feel free to try to break stuff; I feel that not planning for unexpected user input is one of my weak points when it comes to programming, so I'll appreciate any bug reports you can give me about this (or anything else).Thanks in advance.EDIT: D'oh, how 'but a link to the site in question? http://sigfeeder.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SharkBait Posted December 15, 2006 Share Posted December 15, 2006 That's pretty neat.It's like the one I have in my signature. It reads from my Blog's tables and pulls the 3 more recent topics. Mine is like at most 20 lines of code and isn't as fancy as yours.But I like them, I think it is a great way to promote Blogs on forums that allow images. I was actually going to look into creating mine into a Wordpress plugin, but never got that far. Though I do have the tables and queries for pulling from Wordpress tables so perhaps I might continue it one day.If you can create themes/skins for your image that would definately be cool.Did you want feedback on the sigfeeder.com site too or? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albright Posted December 16, 2006 Author Share Posted December 16, 2006 Methinks you kinda skimmed my original post, including the part where I acknowledge that you seem to have come up with the same idea. =PSigFeeder doesn't work by peeking into databases; it uses RSS or Atom feeds from blogs instead. Your blog doesn't seem to be offering a feed, so you might not be able to test it... Did you roll your own blog script?With regards to it being skinnable, I'm all over that! Check out [url=http://sigfeeder.com/Blog/index.php?/archives/XML-SigFeed-layouts-now-working.html]this[/url] for an idea of the wide variety of different looks you can achieve with SigFeeder. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SharkBait Posted December 17, 2006 Share Posted December 17, 2006 My blog is 100% my code. It's kinda like a test bench for when I want to play with new PHP/MySQL techniques. I did skim over your post, started writing and then re-read your post ;) Currently I don't have an RSS Feed, I haven't looked into it yet but perhaps one day I'll have one.Can't wait to see what you do with your SigFeeder! Nice work Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AXiSS Posted December 25, 2006 Share Posted December 25, 2006 SigFeeder itself is pretty cool, I like it. The site needs work though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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