McNicholl Holdings

Targeting users to read about your company can be a difficult proposition. Customers usually just want to know what you can provide and how you can help them. If they are not immediately interested or captivated, it is more likely than not that they will leave and not return.

By integrating a blog feed into the pages of my website I hope to coax my customers and readers into wanting to know more and therefore feel like they are closer to the company. This can make customers more loyal.

Blog software is so user friendly that it already provides the facility to enable its readers to subscribe to an RSS feed - but normal websites dont have an immediate avenue to integrate that feed and maximize its benefit. After all - it is highly likely that the people visiting my website will be the people that will be interested in how it was created, as it is a Holdings company and doesnt really provide much value.

By doing a quick search of google I can find just a couple of good, php based, RSS feed parsers available :

1. MagpieRSS
2. Simplepie

I only mention the php based parsers as this is what is currently relevant to me. If anyone wishes me to conduct a more thorough investigation - just let me know.

I decided to work with the Simplepie RSS parser to integrate my blog feed into the www.mcnicholl.com website.

Lets get to the coding :

require 'location of directory/simplepie.inc';
$in_feed = new SimplePie();
$in_feed->cache_location(location of cache directory);
$in_feed->feed_url(link to the feed);
// now simply initiate the feed
$in_feed->init();

Thats practically all you have to do. The $in_feed variable now holds the rss feed. It is truely very simple with SimplePie.

In order to print out each post in the feed you could just create a for loop and print them out with the following functions :

1. get_feed_link();
2. get_feed_title();
3. get_item_quantity();
4. get_item();
5. get_permalink();
6. get_title();
7. get_description();
8. get_date();

…and that is only the functions that I currently know.

In the future I plan to create a simple drop in - no programming rss feed parser for any website. All the user will have to do is include the RSS feed link. I’ll update everyone here when this is available.