Uly.me

cloud engineer

feed

Feedburner HTTPS Feed

When Google acquired Feedburner a few years ago, we thought it would make Feedburner a better product. The opposite has happened. Google has basically shelved the Feedburner product. There hasn’t been any updates to Feedburner the last 5 years.

If you’ve recently updated your site from http to https, you may have noticed that https feeds are not supported. It looks like Google doesn’t plan on updating Feedburner anytime soon. If you want to replace Feedburner, take a look at couple of options. Try FeedBlitz or perhaps even Mailchimp.

In addition, you can import your current subscribers, and never miss a beat.

SimplePie RSS Reader

If you’re thinking about adding syndication to your website, consider using SimplePie, a super fast and easy-to-use feed parser written in PHP. With SimplePie, adding a RSS feed to your site couldn’t be more easier. In this article, I will show you how to create a RSS page that will display a feed. It will display my blog’s RSS feed as default when nothing is clicked. I’ve included a couple of links that are clickable. When the links are clicked, the RSS feed for that link will be displayed.

First, download SimplePie.

Next, we need to create a file and copy the code below. The code is pretty much self-explanatory.

<?php 
// include SimplePie
require_once('php/autoloader.php');
 
// Create a new object called $feed
$feed = new SimplePie();
 
// Set the default to my blog's RSS at first run
if ($_GET[feed] == "") { $_GET[feed]="http://uly.me/feed/"; }
$feed->set_feed_url($_GET[feed]);
 
// Run SimplePie.
$feed->init();
 
// Send the result to show up on the browser
$feed->handle_content_type();
?>
 
<!-- Display the links -->
<a href="rssfeed.php?feed=http://news.yahoo.com/rss">Yahoo News</a> | 
<a href="rssfeed.php?feed=http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews">Reuter News</a>
 
<!-- Display the header -->
<div class="header">
  <h1><a href="<?php echo $feed->get_permalink(); ?>"><?php echo $feed->get_title(); ?></a></h1>
  <p><?php echo $feed->get_description(); ?></p>
</div>
 
<?php
// Display the feed inside a loop
foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item): ?>
<div class="item">
<li><a href="<?php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>" target="_blank"><?php echo $item->get_title(); ?></a></li>
  <p><?php echo $item->get_description(); ?></p>
  <p><small>Posted on <?php echo $item->get_date('j F Y | g:i a'); ?></small></p>
</div>
<?php 
endforeach;
 
/* end of file */

See the demo. Just add your own CSS stylesheet and you’re ready to go.