I feel like I should begin by stating that my college degree is in English Literature. In other words, I am not formally trained to be a programmer. Still I’ve spent many years working in PHP. It can be liberating to find out that something you thought would be complicated, is actually not that hard when broken down into discrete steps.
This whole adventure started for me when I went looking for a way to parse an RSS feed. Contrary to those who proclaim that RSS is dead, at it’s heart, RSS is XML. As such it’s a useful method to access content. In my case, I wanted to parse my blog RSS feed as well as my most recent Tweets. That was revelation number one.
RSS is XML > XML has a structure that can be put into objects in PHP
To many of my friends and colleagues, this may seem incredibly simple. To me it was a revelation that opened up a new door. I’ve never tried to create an RSS parser before. Suddenly it was less daunting. (Aside: For me, simple truths often come as revelations. To know me is to know this.)
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