Decaflon Thread: Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

seopher — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 04:27:28

SimplePie is the RSS module of choice for us when we're doing such things on large client websites; I have nothing against Magpie and use it for a couple of smaller things, but I have it on good authority that SP is more sustainable for large operations.

Could all be propaganda though...

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

imelgrat — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 07:14:41

Hi there! I use a SimplePie-based Wordpress plugin at my sites (MT-Soft, for instance) and it works wonderfully. I had to tweak it a bit to prevent errors from FeedBurner feeds but all in all, it's a great tool.

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

Scrivs — Mon, 21 May 2007 00:11:04

Well the content coming across our Network isn't necessarily time sensitive like AP news or anything so we could do more updates, but not that much new would come across as of now.

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

Oli — Mon, 21 May 2007 00:09:01

Well I've wondered why you only do 3 updates a day... I thought that might be the reason =)

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

Tyme — Mon, 21 May 2007 00:03:16

No eeking! allowed. Yeah, that creeps me out. Just sayin....

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

Scrivs — Mon, 21 May 2007 00:01:09

Umm, we just use Magpie to parse the feeds that we are pulling. We use cron and store the information so no we don't use Magpie for real-time feed interpretation. That would be a bit insane.

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

Oli — Sun, 20 May 2007 23:53:17

You use Magpie to cover ALL of 9rules' feeds?!

Eek! Cron + any compiled language of your choice ftw

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

Scrivs — Fri, 18 May 2007 22:17:19

@jwynia: If something comes up I will take you up on that offer. I will probably play around with SimplePie this weekend.

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

Griffin — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:52:53

I used SimplePie to power my experiment in a Lifestream. I did it more out of curiosity and boredom than anything. I'm definitely not savvy in the ways of code, but I found SimplePie to be, well, Simple. Easy to set up, and it runs pretty seamlessly for me. Since it's been running I've had no problems. I believe they are going to release a new version soon with a whole bucket of improvements and such.

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

amentele — Fri, 18 May 2007 10:53:15

SimplePie rocks hard (harder than Magpie.) It came out as we were building an rss reader. Love it.

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

peroty — Fri, 18 May 2007 07:35:38

I second that advice! Feedburner --> Simplepie!

Every feed I ran for the newspaper went through Feedburner first, and then (if needed) Yahoo Pipes, since one of the feeds couldn't figure out how to give me the news stories in the order of importance (as it should).

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

jwynia — Fri, 18 May 2007 06:25:36

I've used both Magpie and Simplepie on a variety of projects. If what you want is quick and easy integration of blog-style RSS, SimplePie is really easy to work with.

However, if you're dealing with something that has extended namespaces or in other ways varies at all from vanilla blog posts, SimplePie falls down.

That's because it uses specific methods to access bits of a post and a feed instead of creating an object out of each. Magpie gives you a little bit more "raw" access to the content.

The biggest problem I've found with *any* of these libraries is the fact that in any collection of feeds above about 10-15, there's always some that don't play nice.

I've done some proof of concept stuff for my own purposes that parsed 30,000 feeds or so and it's downright shocking how bad some of them are.

For 9rules, I'd seriously consider running everyone's feeds through something that homogenizes them (like Feedburner) before actually aggregating them.

Scrivs, if you want to chat about this, send me an email (j@wynia.org) and we can have a quick phone call tomorrow.

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

JulianBH — Thu, 17 May 2007 23:47:07

I used to use it, it was pretty awesome. I have no use for it know but I know if I ever need something like that again I'll definitely use SimplePie. It was a breeze to set up, and it's pretty lightweight.

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

peroty — Thu, 17 May 2007 23:21:16

I've used it a couple of times across a few sites.
I love it! It was very easy to get installed and running and it handled feeds how I wanted.
And when I had to use craptastic feeds, I ran them through Yahoo Pipes to whip them into shape. :)

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

Rich — Thu, 17 May 2007 23:13:15

Cant beat a nice simple chicken pie.

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

Scrivs — Thu, 17 May 2007 23:08:17

Cool, looks like I will give it a shot and hopefully it lives up to the hype I've read about it.

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

fadtastic — Thu, 17 May 2007 22:56:05

Scrivs,

I use Simplepie (The Wordpress plugin version) for my footer over at:

http://fadtastic.net/#footer

I cannot comment on the 'full' version but anyone I've spoken to says it rocks their socks. It's worth testing out on a few feeds for sure to see what it can do.

Anyone have experience with SimplePie?

Scrivs — Thu, 17 May 2007 22:50:39

We use MagpieRSS for all our feed duties, but I just recently came across SimplePie and was wondering if it was worth giving it a try. If anyone has any experience with it did you find it easy to use and did it really handle feeds the way you wanted? With 9rules, its up in the air whether or not an Atom feed will work or not and it would be nice to have a system that universally handles feeds the way we want them to.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.