This FAQ is intended for Birdhouse web developers only.

The Magpie RSS parser is installed on Birdhouse, so it’s easy to include the output of other sites’ RSS feeds on your site. Just create a PHP page in your public_html directory which includes the code below, replacing the $rss variable with the address of the feed you want to display:

<?php include('/usr/local/lib/php/magpierss/rss_fetch.inc');

// Set RSS feed to use
$rss = fetch_rss('http://somedomain.org/blog/feed/');

if ($rss) {
 // Split the array to show first 5
	$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, 5);

 // Cycle through each item and echo
	foreach ($items as $item )  {
		echo '<li><a href="'.$item['link'].'">'.$item['title'].'</a> - '.$item['description'].'</li>';
		}

	}

?>

Strongly recommended: Magpie will try to cache its results, so that subsequent results will be nice and fast. Caching will also help prevent you from being banned by servers for requesting RSS feeds too often. You really should run Magpie with caching enabled. Just create a directory called “cache” in the same directory where the script lives, and make it writable by the webserver. You can do this quickly yourself by setting the cache directory to be world-writable:

chmod 777 cache

Please see the Magpie FAQ for more information.

Return to FAQs