Arriving at the Simple Solution
My father sometimes jokes, "Why do things the easy way, when, with a little bit of effort, you can make things impossible?" That's the story of this post.
Regular readers may have noticed the new section on the sidebar entitled What I'm Reading. If you haven't already figured it out, I've started a second blog to keep some notes about — what else — what I'm reading.
Creating a new blog with Blogger is very straightforward: just log in and click on the big blue button that reads "CREATE A BLOG". What might not be so obvious is how to extract the headlines from another blog into a digest on the sidebar. It wasn't obvious to me, anyway, but it turned out to be just as simple: use RSS Digest.
Mind you, I wasn't always aware of the simple solution. When I first started, I spent a considerable amount of time googling, looking for an existing Atom feed reader in PHP that I might reuse. Surprisingly, I didn't find any, so I went to the PHP website and learned enough of the language to slap together a program that could parse an Atom feed and generate a list of links. I even started to write an article in the hope of saving the next poor soul with the same problem the trouble of rolling his own. Then, today, while doing a little bit of research for the article, I came across RSS Digest, a web service that can generate a digest from an Atom feed. They generate a single line of PHP, Javascript, or IFRAME that you can place in your HTML to show the digest.
What's the moral of the story? Ask my father.
Regular readers may have noticed the new section on the sidebar entitled What I'm Reading. If you haven't already figured it out, I've started a second blog to keep some notes about — what else — what I'm reading.
Creating a new blog with Blogger is very straightforward: just log in and click on the big blue button that reads "CREATE A BLOG". What might not be so obvious is how to extract the headlines from another blog into a digest on the sidebar. It wasn't obvious to me, anyway, but it turned out to be just as simple: use RSS Digest.
Mind you, I wasn't always aware of the simple solution. When I first started, I spent a considerable amount of time googling, looking for an existing Atom feed reader in PHP that I might reuse. Surprisingly, I didn't find any, so I went to the PHP website and learned enough of the language to slap together a program that could parse an Atom feed and generate a list of links. I even started to write an article in the hope of saving the next poor soul with the same problem the trouble of rolling his own. Then, today, while doing a little bit of research for the article, I came across RSS Digest, a web service that can generate a digest from an Atom feed. They generate a single line of PHP, Javascript, or IFRAME that you can place in your HTML to show the digest.
What's the moral of the story? Ask my father.
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