In a recent post to PHPMaster.com Kevin Mowry shows you how to use SimplePie, a simple to use programatic feed reader you can use to parse things like RSS feeds.

If you’re an avid feed consumer like I am, you might be a bit sad to see Google’s recent announcement of Reader reaching end of life. Reader was simple and easy to use, but there’s no reason you can’t have the same functionality with your own homegrown project. The PHP library SimplePie allows for quick and easy feed consumption and display. Here’s how you can get started on your own feed reader.

He helps you get it installed (via Composer) and shows you how to use some of its most basic functionality to parse the New York Times' feed. He also includes examples of getting the information back out of the SimplePie object. There's also some snippets that show how to only get the latest items and how to cache the results.

On PHPBuilder.com there's a new tutorial looking at using the SimplePie library to aggregate RSS feeds.

PHP developers are particularly lucky as a fantastic library named SimplePie not only offers the aforementioned features but also supports both RSS and Atom formats, multiple character encodings, and an architecture that makes integration with your favorite content management and blogging platforms a breeze. In this tutorial I'll introduce you to SimplePie, showing you how easy it is to create a rudimentary custom RSS aggregator using this powerful library.

He helps you get SimplePie installed (downloaded and unpacked) pulling in both single and multiple feeds. There's no caching or storage included in the tutorial, but it would be recommended if you choose this as an option for everyday use.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today there's a new tutorial showing how to use the SimplePie aggregation library to create a "lifestream" website of all of your accounts across the web.

In this tutorial we’ll build a page that gathers up the RSS feeds of all those little bits of your life and presents them all together in one spot. To do that, we’ll use SimplePie, a feed parsing class written in PHP. It’s powerful, it’s open source, and it’s easy to use. We’ll then hack on the output a little, and make it all look gorgeous with HTML and CSS. The techniques we’ll cover are also useful if you find that you need to aggregate RSS from many sources, like a news page.

In their example they pull together accounts from Twitter, Flickr and Last.fm. You can check out the code for their example script here.

New from NETTUTS.com today is a tutorial on creating a new scroller, a ticker of the latest information from your choice of news feeds. They use the SimplePie parser (PHP-based) to do most of the work.

This week, we'll learn how to combine PHP, SimplePie, and jQuery to build a simple news scroller widget for your website. It's much easier than you might think; so let's begin.

Their application (source is here) combines PHP - well, SimplePie - and a custom jQuery extension. The screencast walks you through each step the code takes and, and the end, you'll have a simple news block that can show as many of the latest news items ad you'd like.

In this new tutorial from NETTUTS.com there's information on how to create a gallery of the images from your Flickr account with help from SimplePie, a PHP tool for parsing XML feeds (like RSS).

Ok, so we're going to be touching on a number of technologies for this tutorial. We'll be using an RSS feed from Flickr, a bit of PHP, and some jQuery to make things nice and interactive! We'll use SimplePie to handle the RSS feed, as it makes life much easier, and can be used in any other projects where RSS feeds are involved.

They pull in the public photo information for a given user ID and parse details like the title of the gallery and each image's details, including descriptions. Add in a few links, some Javascript (jQuery) and HTML and you have a simple image gallery that automatically updates when you upload new photos to Flickr. You can grab the source here or just see it in action in their demo.

In this recent tutorial from the NETTUTS website, they show how to "build a better blogroll" by combining the client-side power of jQuery with the simplicity of the SimplePie aggregation tool.

A traditional blogroll is a simple list of other sites, often in the sidebar, that are related, owned by, or otherwise friendly to the home site. Blogrolls are a great idea and on-point with the spirit of blogging, but how is a casual reader to know if any of these sites are truly of interest? Let's improve upon the concept of a blogroll by not just listing sites, but dynamically pulling recent headlines from them, and using some fun jQuery animation.

Their code (demo here) uses a CSS-based layout and simple pagination to switch between multiple groupings of RSS feed content.

On the CSS Tricks blog there's a recent article showing how to combine the jQuery Javascript library and the SimplePie PHP feed aggregator to create a iPhone/mobile interface to any RSS feed.

We are going to create a web page that is formatted specifically for the iPhone (but would presumably be good for other mobile devices as well). This web page will dynamically fill itself with content from any RSS feed that you give it. The interface is going to be built to be easy to use on a mobile device, with large "touchable" areas and nice (jQuery) animations that whisk you between articles.

They work through the process - five simple steps:

• Create the iPhone Environment
• Pull in the RSS Feed
• Creating the Front Page: Headlines Only
• Creating the Article Pages: jQuery Slider Style
• Adding Some Flair

All code and images needed are included (as well as a demo if you'd like to try it out).

John Highland has a quick tutorial showing how to create a lifestream with PHP out of all of the RSS feeds surrounding the multiple social networking and blogging sites you have out there (with the help of SimplePie).

Its not secret, I love social networking, I cant get enough of it. I also love programming and anything internet related. I'm not sure how I came across it, but a PHP based, Object Oriented RSS caching tool named SimplePie caught my attention.

SimplePie offers one piece of functionality that he found particularly useful - the ability to merge RSS feeds easily. He took advantage of the ability and pulled together his Twitter, Flickr, Pownce, Digg and Youtube RSS feeds to make one mega-feed. You can see an example of it in action over on his personal site.

The Bakery has four new articles/tutorials posted today covering things like Mambo's choice to go with CakePHP, a layout switcher, SimplePie and caching elements.

• Mambo-licious - Join us in welcoming Mambo to the CakePHP community.
• Automatic Layout Switcher - This component allows you to have two layouts for one site and switches between them automatically based on the domain.
• SimplePie CakePHP Component - SimplePHP is a PHP class for retrieval and parsing of RSS feeds.
• Cache Elements Individually For Each User - Caching elements in general has been discussed before on bakery and this article takes caching of an element to a higher level. This article explains how to cache elements individually for each user.

Be sure to check out the rest of The Bakery for more great CakePHP-related content and news.

The Bakery has four new articles/tutorials posted today covering things like Mambo's choice to go with CakePHP, a layout switcher, SimplePie and caching elements.

• Mambo-licious - Join us in welcoming Mambo to the CakePHP community.
• Automatic Layout Switcher - This component allows you to have two layouts for one site and switches between them automatically based on the domain.
• SimplePie CakePHP Component - SimplePHP is a PHP class for retrieval and parsing of RSS feeds.
• Cache Elements Individually For Each User - Caching elements in general has been discussed before on bakery and this article takes caching of an element to a higher level. This article explains how to cache elements individually for each user.

Be sure to check out the rest of The Bakery for more great CakePHP-related content and news.