Just in a few hours of announcing yesterday our new version of the Feed2JS (RSS to JavaScript service/code), David Carter-Tod zoomed out the gate, downloaded the code, and had it up and running in Virginia. As well, he found a minor bug (pesky missing semi-colon) and reminded me to deal with the server parameters for the build.php script for sites where register globals is off.
Anyhow, I set up a little form where you can share a web site name and URL where the new version is being used/hosted, that gets added to the list of examples.
In addition, I had wavered back and forth about including a list of RSS resources, as there are already piles of lists out there. It was not there yesterday, but today a starting one is available as I realized I wanted to include a collection of other sites that offer the same sort of service (I found 9 so far). So if you have a favorite, cherished RSS for total newbies sort of link, please send ’em my way.
By the way, that is what is slick about the templated format for this web site- it is only a single PHP file, and the top menus are built on the fly, and content inserted by simple include statements. It allows me to add new sections, re-arrange the order of the navigation with one edit, rather than the old static HTML approach of changing the navigation links on every freakin’ page if you make any changes. Mmmmmm, PHP…. mmmmmmm
Alan or David ˆ± could either of you please provide more details related to “server parameters for the build.php script for sites where register globals is off”
Thanks
Often in PHP server setups, a default behavior is set for security reasons that prevent you from directly accessing variable values that are passed to the script.
When register globals is ON (what we do), if you pass a variable named $foo to a PHp script you can directly access it by doing:
echo “the value of foo is $foo”;
When register globals is OFF, you need to extract it from an array that is created to store the variables:
echo “the value of foo is ” . $_GET[‘foo’];
The difference is minor, but if you do not take the latter route, in an environment where register globals is off, your variables will never have values. This is pretty much irrelevant, as I have written the latter approach (which works regardless of the value of register globals) into the Feed2JS script but had not done so for the build.php one which can be used locally to create a form that allows users to preview the Feed or create the cut and paste javascript. It is not required to use the Feed2JS scripts (but helps as a tool).
Bottom line- you do not really need to worry about it.
Thanks for this Alan – it explains why the build.php from your original scripts would not work on my server.
I am not a coder, so I did a little searching on the net and found the folowing that has fixed the problems for your original build script:
http://www.liquidpulse.net/code/3
Both suggested methods workd for me.
I will have to go ahead an install your latest version as well.
Thanks for the very valuable work on this.