It’s As Easy as SimplePie

SimplePie RSS

In a moment reminiscent of the famous scene in The Graduate, I whispered to Jim Groom the word SimplePie. Long story short, don’t tell Jim about something new, neat, and cool, and expect him not to blog about it right away. So here is my SimplePie wiki contribution. The plugin works by making available a <feed> tag that will encompass any RSS/Atom feed URL and have it display nicely within a wiki page.

The real strength of this extension comes when used in combination with del.icio.us, especially where media files are involved. As I talked about long ago, I have a del.icio.us feed that gets ported into iTunes that is comprised of mp3 files that I mark with a “tolisten” tag. This allows me to instantly podcastify any random mp3 that I find out in cyberspace. Now, with the wiki plugin, I can share those files on a wiki page, and keep them automatically up-to-date. As Jim said, we are in the early stages of playing, but when something works this well right out of the gate, it lends itself to further exploration. SimplePie appears to be a deep cave.

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3 Responses

  1. I gave you full credit, but I just can’t wait for the cows to come home! Che bella SimplePie in MediaWiki.

  2. Although it’s not there yet, we’re planning to add support for the iTunes RSS and Media RSS tags, including being able to utilize those enclosures, thumbnails, etc. This is currently being explored for integration ASAP. 🙂

  3. Ryan,

    That’s outstanding news!

    I haven’t yet had a chance to investigate this detail–could you give me a glimpse of how it handles <category> elements, especially as I’ve seen them used in a variety of ways (e.g., with a term= attribute for the category name, with the category name as text content inside the element, sometimes with a domain=attribute, etc.).

    Thanks Andy and Ryan!
    Patrick

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