RSS Digest, the folks who turn my del.icio.us feed into a tidy list (previous mention) for my sidebar has come out with a new version of their service with the following updates:
* A total rewrite. Every unoptimized system is now the epitome of fast.
* Throughput increased from 100,000 requests per day to 1 million+
* Response time cut by 80%
* Use real HTML instead of the old silly formatting system
* Select from pre-existing feeds
* Slicker URLs
* Drenible-free
* Atom support is still a low priority, sorry! (but it nearly all works)
* HTML in RSS feeds is now NOT parsed out
* Improved international support (primarily UTF-8)
* Add ads to your digests (for when you distribute code to other people)
* Still no ads from us..!
For my purposes it is really the same as the last version, but either way it is worth checking out if you want to convert a feed into a list.
I vaguely remember a big stink about PHP register_globals being turned off by default as of PHP 4.2, but I didn't really understand what it was all about until I tried moving the following lines of code from a server with register_globals turned on to one one with register_globals turned on and it went nuts:
if (empty($story))
$story = rand(1,$count);
Fortunately I quickly found this explanation complete with examples (gotta love examples!). So, after briefly considering saying 'fuck security,' I went ahead and tried the following based on one of the exaples and it worked!
if (isset($_SESSION['story']))
$story = rand(1,$count);
So, screw you register_globals!
Actually, that didn't work. I'm not sure why I thought it did. After some more digging I realized I had to 'manually' retrieve the value from the url by adding
$story = $_GET['story'];
So, those two lines of code turned into the following three:
$story = $_GET['story'];
if (empty($story))
$story = rand(1,$count);
Which would probably make more sense in the context that it is followed by:
if ($story < $count)
$next = $story+1;
else
$next = 1;
Fool me once, shame on you...
