ExpatTech Techblog - PHP

As RSS 2.0 is a well-established standard nowadays and a lot of people actually use it, it is quite useful sometimes to create an RSS feed for a blog or a news section. When creating the new ExpatTech TechBlog I really wanted to implement this feature, so I digged into the topic a bit.

The first important thing to know that an RSS is actually an XML document, so you have to comply with the XML standards, and also RSS has a well-defined standard structure that you want to follow. One nice tool is W3C's Feed Validation Service to check your feed.

Of course I wanted to generate the RSS using PHP, because the whole site uses this technology. On websites the recommended charset is UTF-8, so for the examples I will use that.

There is a practical way to detect the version of flash running on the client's computer. We will use System.capabilities class to reach our goal.

Description:

First of all flash gets a parameter called "url". This will be the url of a php file to call after version is detected. Keep in mind that if the php is not called then there is no flash player at all.

Sometimes you just have to send an e-mail with PHP. Contact forms, notifications, forgotten passwords, registration confirmations, whatever. PHP's mail() is an easy solution and with a little tweaking it is capable to do a lot.

The basic format for mail() is like this (well for our purposes... but you can check the complete reference):

mail ($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

Returns boolean true if sending the mail was successful.