In a new tutorial over on PHPBuilder.com today, they demonstrate how to create and work with one of the most popular data exchange formats on the web today - RSS.

Recently I was looking for an RSS aggregator. I was having surprising difficulty finding one that did exactly what I wanted. [...] I began seriously considering writing my own. This month, I show you how to create a basic RSS reader yourself.

He gives a simple primer to what RSS is and what it looks like (explaining the XML spec) and includes an example of what a simple document looks like. He uses the older XML functionality in PHP (expat) to do the parsing and includes to code that he uses to get the job done.