I finally got a chance to play with SimplePie, which I first wrote about last month. As I was checking out the tutorials I downloaded a demo called NewBlocks and found that I didn’t really need to do anything else.
This is what I love about open source and the community that builds things for the common good. Things like the Apache Software Foundation sponsor projects that obsolete proprietary software stacks – goodbye webMethods pub.web:documentToRecord, hello XMLBeans.
Open source projects allow you to build out a solution with nothing more than design and time. I’ve built out solutions on the back of MySQL, Tomcat, Hibernate, and others using Eclipse for zero dollars but it cost many months. And now I’ve built out The Mortgage{ist} with zero dollars and one hour. Yes that’s right, a fully functioning website that looks great in one hour. Surely you jest you say?
It’s true. And don’t call me Shirley.
Ryan Parman has created a great looking design and functional code on top of SimplePie which can be downloaded and changed to fit your individual purpose. I was immediately faced with a dilemma in that my design skills are generally acknowledged to be simple. So if his ’starting point’ looks this good and does the job, do I really need to do more? My answer was not really, at least not to start with. So I left it, only changing the feeds that I wanted. Done. I don’t know if it gets any easier than that.
Maybe this is the dawn of a new age of open source? Projects get developed on top of a foundation that has been contributed and released as ready-to-go solutions. If so, NewsBlocks is a wonderful step in that direction.
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hey… it tooks ages to load… did you set up the cache correctly? You might need to check your PHP error log to see if everything is fine
ps… I did a similar one to yours with simplepie and newsblock, but with a totally different topic. see my website.
yup, everything is set up fine. you’ve highlighted the problem with shared hosting – resource sharing. I love A Small Orange but availability for my sites has been at times spotty.