by Mike Shea on 28 July 2002
Newsfeed section of the Mike Shea Web Empire. I wrote a whole new Page Caching system, rewrote the RSS parser from scratch, and wrote a whole new Custom News Portal. The RSS parser is far simpler now, practically ignoring any real XML validation and simply parsing through the file looking for link title pairs. While far less elegant, it is much easier to maintain.The page caching system allows me to cache any page on the web once an hour. I use it almost exclusivly for my army of page parsers that let me strip links from all over including Ebert, usenet, ezboard and lots of other places.The most exciting thing is the custom news page that lets you pick any number of the cached news feeds and build them into your own news page updated each hour. For example here's General News, Home Cinema News and Everquest News. Not bad for a total of 200 lines of code (for all three apps).