net art

Using Magpie RSS to scrape blog headlines to html » read article

posted by ian grant on March 25, 2006 at 9:43 am | in digital art hacks, general, net art, web 2.0 | 1 comment

This walkthrough assumes you have access to a server running PHP and the ability to change permissions on directories.

Step One: Get MagpieRSS here! Head to sourceforge and grab the latest copy of the excellent MagpieRSS.

Step Two: Read the docs. Quickstart: setup a directory on the webserver that looks a bit like this:

Directory 001

Set the permission of the “cache” directory to 777 – world writable. You may be able to get away with more restricted permissions.

Step Three: use the code below as a starting point for exploration. You can see the results of it here here

There are several lines you can comment/uncomment to see the object magpierss returns. The current example is set to return the results of a blogger feed. With some extra code one can detect the feed and provide summaries accordingly… that is to come.


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<?php
require_once('magpierss/rss_fetch.inc');
// the @ suppresses errors
// change the URL to the blog atom / rss feed.
// If the feed is not atom but RSS some of the
// item names will be different - one will need
// to check. The info is in the 'channel' array.

$rss = @fetch_rss( 'http://internetandnetworkart.blogspot.com/atom.xml' );
// $rss = @fetch_rss( 'http://ellington.tvu.ac.uk/dev/?feed=rss2' );

// dump the object to the screen to study the structure magpie returns
echo '

';
print_r($rss);
echo '

';
// end dump

$channel = $rss->channel;
echo "Blog Title: " .$channel['title'];

//display links recent blog entries:

echo “Latest blog additions:\n";
foreach ($rss->items as $item) {

   $href = $item['link'];
   $title = $item['title'];
   $author = $item['author_name'];
   $created = $item['created'];
   $content = $item['atom_content'];

   echo "$title created by $author on $created\n
   $content\n"
}

echo '

';

?>

The sample files can be downloaded here:

magpierss_blog_scrape.zip

online: seaside towns with curious – performance and media » read article

posted by ian grant on June 10, 2003 at 2:59 pm | in net art, portfolio | Comments Off

seaside towns screenshot 1

placelessness.com commissioned by south east arts. words by helen paris, photography by leslie hill, web design, qtvr and flash by ian grant. as a collaborator with curious, i designed an episodic online narrative located along the south east coastline of the uk. Using quicktime virtual reality (qtvr), flash and other web technologies, we created an innovative interactive episodic narrative.

seaside towns screenshot 2

in pre-blog times, curious developed a groundbreaking style of web art that was location specific, temporal, that bridged virtual and visceral space and explored textual and visual narrative. see route 66 and left bank cafe for other earlier examples of curious’ work in a similar form.

seaside towns screenshot 3

(cc) ian grant some rights reserved