Automated Blog Summary
The 2mm Homepage has a section at the bottom which automatically summarises information from blogs.
It is written using a tool called SimplePie, which is a free PHP script.
The page component is produced by passing the RSS feed URLs to a PHP script, which, in turn calls SimplePie. This breaks the various feeds down to their individual articles (or items). They are then sorted in date order, and those older than the time limit (30 days) are discarded. Finally, various "illegal" characters are deleted from the RSS, the text is truncated to a few hundred characters, and each "Item" is displayed in date order.
The net effect is a resource of "what's new" on a number of blogs and websites in one place, yet requiring hardly any effort to setup or maintain.
The blog or website owner just needs to generate valid RSS/XML; most ready-to-use blog sites do this automatically. And the 2mm website owner has to add the RSS URL once to a script, and everything is then automated !
