Thanks to Mutilated for writing a GREAT little tutorial on parsing RSS with PHP and getting it in your website. If you need help with this tutorial, ask your questions here.  Remember, be specific - asking questions like "it doesn't work" will make it hard for us to help you.

Quick and Easy Site Content with RSS and PHP

I tried the SimpleReader.php, saved it as feed2html.php and uploaded it to my site. But when I run it:

http://gain4you.net/feed2html.php

I got these errors:

Warning: fopen(8c7531e7875a57aec03bfcce19c10161): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/gain4y/domains/gain4you.net/public_html/feed2html.php on line 113



Warning: fwrite(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/gain4y/domains/gain4you.net/public_html/feed2html.php on line 114



Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/gain4y/domains/gain4you.net/public_html/feed2html.php on line 115

What is wrong?

Good question.  Obvioulsy Mutilated1 would be the best person to answer that question, but what I would suggest is including the feed2html.php file in a special directory on your server and setting the permissions of the directory to 777.

Out of curiosity, did you change the $ttl variable at all?

I have heard from a few different SEO experts that RSS feeds may actually hurt your search engine rankings, while other say it's the best way to keep good rankings...   The search engines are so unpredictable that I have become very hesitant in implementing any new techniques...  Anyone have any input? Thanks...

Kwezi (and anyone else who has this problem)

Two ways to solve the problem...

1.  you should place the RSS parsing script in its own folder.  For example, create a folder called 'phpscripts'.  Then, set the permissions of that folder to "777", or, if you are using a unix file system, rxwrxwrxw (most FTP programs let you do this).  This should solve the problem.

2.  Don't use the caching - in the rss2html.php file, find the variable '$ttl'.  Set that variable to 0 - this will disable the caching. Edit...this actually won't work.  See this post to temporarily fix the problem

Let me know if this works

(TA, I get a 404 error - did you delete your page?)

rserpe wrote:

I have heard from a few different SEO experts that RSS feeds may actually hurt your search engine rankings, while other say it's the best way to keep good rankings...   The search engines are so unpredictable that I have become very hesitant in implementing any new techniques...  Anyone have any input? Thanks...

I don't think that putting an RSS feed on your site will hurt your rankings, but I also really doubt if it helps.  Unfortunately I don't have any evidence one way or another to make a good determination.  It seems pretty far-fetched, though, to say that it would hurt your rankings.

SiteReference wrote:

Kwezi (and anyone else who has this problem)

Two ways to solve the problem...

1.  you should place the RSS parsing script in its own folder.  For example, create a folder called 'phpscripts'.

SR Thanks does this include the ____.php file as well or its just the RSS parsing script?

Thank

Just the RSS parsing script...

When you include the 'include' statement, just make sure you have the right path to the file.

Thanks for the script, it worked out pretty easily.

Though I am having a problem with getting feeds from the array

$RSSFEEDS = array(
    0 => "http://www.foxnews.com/xmlfeed/blogs/0,4333,,00.rss",
    1 => "http://www.site-reference.com/xml.php?c=all",
    2 => "http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot",
);

If I change the 0 below to 1, I get your feed, if I leave it at 0, I get foxnews feed

if (!isset($feedid)) $feedid = 0;
$rss_url = $RSSFEEDS[$feedid];

I even tried changing counter to 50

    for ($counter = 1; $counter <= 50; $counter++ )

How do I get all the feeds from the array?

Thanks

wer

Yes that would be a better way to do it.  Next time, I will try and be more carefull with the instructions.

Putting the script in its own folder would be best.

Also, when you make your own folder and put the script in there and run it for a while when you next FTP into your site you may see a strange file named "c9d44a39b2e1188cc4dbd683e0b866e5" or something equally strange.  Thats nothing to worry about its just the cache copy of the RSS feed.

The script will cache the RSS from the other site so that your page will load faster on the majority of the page loads, and also the webmasters you will pull the RSS feed from will appreciate you taking some of the load of their servers.

@travelagent - you better get this to work Skip - I wrote this article especially for you.  If I don't see an RSS feed on your site it will be a total failure - ha ha ha

wer wrote:

Thanks for the script, it worked out pretty easily.
...
How do I get all the feeds from the array?

wer, if you want multiple feeds from different sites, then look at example #3 the advanced reader.

I didn't have space to write about its use in the article, but example #4 is the source code for the page that uses it.

Basically, what you'll do is get the Advanced Reader ( example #3) upload it to your server just as you did with the simple reader.

Then do this to get started

<?php



include("Reader.php");

$myRSS = new rssReader();



?>

Then everywhere you want a feed to appear, you do this

<?php

$myRSS->createHtmlFromFeed(0,10);

?>

The  first number "0" specifys which one of the feeds you want to use and the second number "10" specifys how many entries from that feed to display.  That way you can get all the entries, or just 2 or 3 depending on what will fit in your layout.

OR

The Advanced Reader will also let you do this:

<?php

$myRSS->createHtmlFromRSSUrl("http://www.somesite.com/rss.xml",10);

?>

I've tried everything suggested here and it still doesn't work. I don't get an error, it just displays the code and not the feed. I'm using other PHP code on the site that works fine....this doesn't.

Can you provide us with a link over to the page?

In folder:  CHMOD 775
http://www.all-about-planters.com/RSS/SimpleReader.php

Not:  CHMOD 775
http://www.all-about-planters.com/SimpleReader.php

I just put your sample feeds back in, in case it was the feed I was trying and still doesn't work.

Thanks

Scarlett,

I don't know if this will do it (kind of a shot in the dark), but your script starts out this way:

<? php

Try chaging that to

<?php

(in other words, remove the space between the ? and php)

Mutilated1 wrote:

wer, if you want multiple feeds from different sites, then look at example #3 the advanced reader.

I didn't have space to write about its use in the article, but example #4 is the source code for the page that uses it.

Basically, what you'll do is get the Advanced Reader ( example #3) upload it to your server just as you did with the simple reader.

Thanks again, very very cool of you to share this with us, worked great

well 1 little problem in reader.php
        // Well do up the top 3 entries from the feed
        for ($counter = 3; $counter <= $howmany; $counter++ )

the 3 needs to be set at 1 or it starts getting feed at item #3 ????

Not sure why, but when I changed it to a 1 it worked perfectly

Thanks again

and this couldn't have been any easier, nice work

Thanks Mutilated - easy one for me so far.

Although, my first problem was expecting to see the RSS feed in an HTML page. Idiot, idiot, idiot. Changed the page to a php page and no problem.

Used a blog feed from my site: Sail Search Blog to be displayed on this page: Sail Search Home

Next step is to multiple feeds.

I have noticed that on one of my other sites, where I am using an Amazon RSS feed for books, which stays pretty static I do rank extremely well for one particular book, so I am inclined to conclude that I am NOT being penalised for that RSS News feed.

Also a few of my RSS news feeds are published on a sailing news aggregator and my Google alerts regularly show my sites content in that one, so, again I do not think that the aggregator is being ''punished'' by the Search Engines.

Thought I would point out that M1's article has just been 'Digged'.  Awesome job Mutilated!

Easy RSS Integration

I had actually added the space, trying to make it work..no space version online now. Still doesn't work.

sounds like the title of the article may need to be ammended from

Quick and Easy Site Content with RSS and PHP

to
Fairly Quick and Almost Easy Site Content with RSS and PHP