In a new post to his blog today, Raphael Stolt shows how to take the output from the Zend_Log component of the Zend Framework and, with a bit of custom coding, make it output an RSS feed.

Whilst touring the web I found an interesting project for turning Apache Web Server log files into RSS feeds. This approach can be adjusted to monitor the maintenance needs of a web application deployed on an assumed productive system. Therefor a XML capable Zend_Log instance will be set up and the resulting log file will be transformed into a RSS feed via a custom Action Helper wrapping a XSLT transfomation.

He sets up the XML logger first, using the Zend_Log, Zend_Log_Writer_Stream and Zend_Log_Formatter_Xml to create the XML output from the logging. Then, with the help of the custom helper - Recordshelf_Controller_Action_Helper_Xslt - he reformats the XML output into an RSS feed ready for public consumption. (There's even a screenshot of what it might look like in a feed reader).