Quite a while ago I blogged alot about a clients site called inBlogs, an Ad-Free Web-Related Aggregator. Well now I own the site and have made some significant changes to the site to improve its speed and backend. The main initial problem we had with the site before was that it would clog up and stop functioning when lots of feeds needed updating. This has now been resolved and the site moved over to a new host. So far the site is running nice and quickly, with no hangs experienced over the past 2 weeks.

The Friend of inBlogs will be re-added and all the friends of the previous inBlogs copied over. I will be doing a big advert campaign once I feel the changes to the site have been completed, this will boost not only traffic to inBlogs but traffic to active blogs that are been aggregated by inBlogs.

For now if you have a blog and wish to add it to inBlogs please do so.

Lately I have been developing inBlogs, a site which aggregates posts from 148 (and growing) web-related blogs into one place. These are then split into pages. In this post what SimplePie is, more detailed posts will follow.
What exactly is SimplePie?

The script allows you to parse RSS and ATOM feeds in PHP, which allows you to show posts from a feed or several feeds in a page or menu on your website. Or like me develop a whole site featured around the parsed feeds.

SimplePie for one feed.

Parsing one feed can be helpful to some people. A demo of this can be seen here. Using this you can create simple menu’s to add to your site or blog to show the latest posts from a blog or news section on a website. Say you have a technology blog you might want to add a menu that shows the last 5 posts from engadget.

SimplePie for multiple feeds.

If you want to have several feeds to be parsed together then SimplePie Multifeeds is for you. It allows you to parse as many feeds as you like into one all sorted by date. This is what is used on inBlogs. Using this you can create menu’s or pages or even plugins that aggregate posts from feeds. On Macommand a Wordpress SimplePie plugin is used to automatically create posts from several feeds. Meaning I don’t have to update the site manually. This can be very helpful if your a lazy blogger like me.

This post is just the first post about SimplePie. This may get updated and posted again to add more details. I will be doing several tutorials about SimplePie over the next coming weeks.

After a long day of reading wiki’s and coding this Aggregator plugin its finally time to take a little break… and sleep ofcourse.

I managed to get a few pages for the plugin done, just gotta…

• Set up an array to list all the feed urls.
• Create an admin area to accept feeds.
• Friends system.
• Friend of the day system.

Should be good fun tomorrow… After this I have a nice Joomla! Skin / Theme to create for a client.