Ben Ramsey

Aaron Wormus recently criticized me on IRC for putting too much thought and effort into blogging. He may have a point there. I’ve got a huge list of things I want to write about, but I haven’t put forth the effort because I do take too much time to write a post. So, here goes one for writing up a quick post…

I recently upgraded a few things around here (in particular, an upgrade to PHP 5.2), and I noticed two issues that occurred after the upgrade:

1. My Flickr photo feed no longer worked, and
2. My blogroll was no longer sorting alphabetically

I easily solved both of these issues:

The Flickr photo feed

I’m not entirely sure whether this problem was a result of the PHP 5.2 upgrade and SimpleXML becoming more particular about namespaces or Flickr simply changing the namespace string in their feed. I believe it was the latter. In short, my code stopped working because the namespace lacked a trailing slash (/). It would’ve been great if Flickr had notified everyone about this first.

The code looked something like this:

<?php
 
$flickr_rss = simplexml_load_file('http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=49198866@N00&format=rss_200');
 
foreach ($flickr_rss->channel->item as $item)
{
    $link   = (string) $item->link;
    $media  = $item->children('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss');
    $thumb  = $media->thumbnail->attributes();
    $url    = (string) $thumb['url'];
    $width  = (string) $thumb['width'];
    $height = (string) $thumb['height'];
    $title  = (string) $item->title;
 
    // display image here
}
 
?>

Note the namespace listed in $item->children('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss');. It’s lacking a trailing slash. This was never a problem before, but it seems that the Flickr feed changed to include a trailing slash, so SimpleXML was no longer able to properly get the data. I simply changed it to http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/ (note the trailing slash), and all worked fine.

Blogroll sorting

This was more than likely a result of the upgrade to PHP 5.2, though I can’t be sure. My blog sorting code worked like this:

<?php
 
// sort by name
$name = array();
foreach ($blogs as $k => $v)
{
    $name[$k] = $v['name'];
}
array_multisort($name, SORT_ASC, $blogs);
 
?>

Unfortunately, after the upgrade, this no longer worked. I had to add the SORT_STRING flag as a parameter to array_multisort() so that the line now reads:

<?php
 
array_multisort($name, SORT_ASC, SORT_STRING, $blogs);
 
?>

And that fixed it.

Just thought I’d share the info in case this helps anyone.