Over at blogs4God, I’ve been building an aggregator for the moderators. And with all the Perl I example around here, you would think I would hack out a solution that would make Larry Wall proud.

Ha! Fooled you! I’m using PHP instead. Sure, I could have produced glorious output via Perl with some help from Lincoln Stein’s CGI.PM library. And yes, I could have combined LWP::Simple with XML::RSSLite to get the job done, but I noticed that much of the work I needed to do had already been accomplished with a PHP class named MagpieRSS.

MagpieRSS provides an XML-based (expat) RSS parser in PHP. MagpieRSS is compatible with RSS .9 through RSS 1.0, and supports the RSS 1.0′s modules. (with a few exceptions) . It does this by employing an ultra-liberal approach to rss parsing. Which is exactly what I needed to build an aggregator that took into consideration such a garden variety of RSS, RDF and XML syndication feeds sported by the various blogs at blogs4God.

Besides, I’ve been neglecting you PHP guys (and gals) lately. So here’s a tool you can sink your teeth, or in this case, beek into.