Magpie RSS and WordPress Feeds
This is a continuation of my discussion regarding the CARP solution to RSS aggregation. I’ve concluded that the CARP solution is too limited for handling the character encoding I throw at it. The particular character-encoding problem I encountered was the substitution of a question mark for every apostrophe in the WordPress item title tag and I am not sure whether to blame the WordPress RSS feed or CARP. The reason for this inadequacy (as I see it) is that it does not handle ATOM feeds with their more advanced character encoding abilities. I have experimented with Magpie RSS and found it handles the ATOM feeds gracefully and that character encoding has not been an issue on my ATOM feeds.
The weakness of Magpie is its lack of advanced functions to format the cached feeds. This lack of pre-designed functionality is a strength because Magpie is designed with the PHP programmer in mind, allowing a great deal of control with a little knowledge of PHP. It also seems to load more quickly when the feed has not been cached, but this is based on an observation rather than benchmarks. Overall, I find that for my purposes Magpie is by far the best solution. For those with little or no programming experience, CARP offers a quick way to incorporate your WordPress posts throughout the rest of your web site, but Magpie will help you do it with fewer character encoding issues.
By the way, if you are wondering how to use the Magpie technology built into the latest version of Wordpress, check out Secrets of WP Theming: Part 3 by Chris Davis.
2 comments March 7th, 2005
