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RSS feeds are a must-have for modern websites. It’s easy enough to make an RSS feed of recent articles in PHP. But did you know an RSS feed can simply be information - not links to articles?

This article will look at how to build a basic feed of data - for our purposes, we’ll consider random quotes. It will also illustrate how to use SimpleXML to build the feed for us.
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I read about the Digg API the other day, and I thought it was about time I played around with it.

There is a ton of cool stuff you can do with this. Basically, you send a request to the Digg server and it sends back whatever kind of information you want - category names, recent diggs, recent stories, archived stories, etc. You can read through the API to see everything you can do.

For now, we’ll focus on one nifty little trick - grabbing a random story from a given topic.
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I was browsing the Sitepoint forum today and somebody raised this question - is it better to use ‘and’ or ‘&&’ as a logical operator in PHP?

In most cases, they evaluate the same way. For example, these two statements are equivalent.

if ($x && $y) { ... }
if ($x and $y) { ... }

So what’s the difference?
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A user on Programming Talk had a problem the other day. He was trying to build an XML parser to work with an xml data file (a character sheet from the WoW Armory).

His parser wasn’t working - because all of the information was stored in attributes instead of child elements. What’s the difference between the two? And how can we fix it?

Use SimpleXML.
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Most blogging platforms come with built-in support for RSS feeds. Why? It’s a great way for users to keep up to date on your new content. Instead of loading up a dozen favorite sites, they can look at one feed reader and then decide what to pursue further.

So what if you don’t use a blogging platform or CMS that creates a feed for you? You can create one yourself in PHP. It’s pretty simple.
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There are a lot of situations in which you’d like to alternate CSS styles from one element to the next. Long tables, for example, look a lot nicer when the background color of the rows is alternated.

How do we do that? Some pretty simple PHP can help you accomplish this task and spice up your HTML/CSS.
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I was looking for a project to tackle today, and I decided to make a script that would convert lengths from one unit or system to another.

It doesn’t sound all that complicated - and it’s not. I had a working script in a few minutes, but I didn’t like it. It had too many functions to do conversions for individual units. I wanted this script to be pretty well abstracted so that I could easily add new unit types - and so that the source code for the class would be very short.
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I just added an RSS feed widget to my site (see the lower right corner - the DZone links). I frequent dZone a decent amount, and I find a lot of the articles interesting.

However, after some thought I became concerned that ten sitewide external links might be a bit of a drain on my pagerank. If only I could add “rel=nofollow” to all those links. But there’s no option in the RSS Widget to do that.
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Practically every site today has an RSS feed. Now, you could be like everyone else and simply use this as a way to read information as it’s published.

Or, you could use RSS for what’s intended for - content syndication. With Simple XML, it’s a piece of cake to use an RSS feed to add a list of links to relevant articles on your page.
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A couple weeks ago, I wrote a short article about how to create a multi-page form.

The simple solution I suggested involved a foreach loop that cycled through the $_POST array and sent every value along in a hidden input element. After a bit of reflection (and some useful comments), I realized there’s a teeny tiny security hole in that approach - so I’ve slightly modified it to close the loophole.
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