I recently had realized I subscribed to too many feeds. This really wasn’t an issue for me except that it dawned on me that of all the feeds I subscribe to I still scour the internet looking for more information on my topics of interest. Some websites I visit do not have feeds (believe it or not, there are a lot of them). And I wondered why it was so easy to find related websites (Google) but so difficult to find related feeds. Thus, I designed F-E-E-D-Z.com.
To start off, obviously I didn’t look very hard. I know there are several feed directories out there. Because they are now my competition I will not mention them by name. But I wanted to build my own. I wanted to build a feed directory that would index and make searchable any feed on the internet (in RSS or Atom format). I also wanted to add to my portfolio (never hurts). I wanted to see how fast I could do it (after all, parsing Xml is a rather easy task). And I wanted to do it with CakePHP.
I chose CakePHP after thoroughly reviewing Joomla!. I thought about Wordpress; after all, I’ve found using Wordpress and a couple of plugins really helps get the website indexed fast by the search engines. However, I’ve often found Wordpress has what I would call “dirty code”. I’m more of an MVC kind of guy. So when it comes to building a website from the ground up Wordpress is typically not my first option. Joomla! came into consideration as well. However, though Joomla! has a vast library of non-commercial extensions, the ones I really needed and felt were best beneficial would be more costly than I was willing to put into this project. With CakePHP, I knew I could easily set up a couple of controllers and views, write the search engine and get the info into a database fast and have it pulled fast.
All in all the website took approximately 20 hours to write. I’ll be the first to admit it’s not pretty. There are some things I can definately improve. But considering what it is and what it can do it’s not a bad deal at all. It’s certainly presentable and operates as it was intended. Soon, I’ll be adding a user module that will allow visitors to save feeds to their profile or to their feed reader (Firefox, Yahoo, Google, etc.). I’d also like to add a ranking system. Plus, I’ll assign each feed to a category setup similar to DMOZ (currently, the only way to find related feeds is by doing a search). The search process could use refining as well but that may be something done as fast and quick as tonight.
All in all, I think it’s a pretty nice little website that comes with great benefit to whomever feels the need to use it. Not only can visitors find immediate and relevant information they are seeking but it also provides a great way for new websites to expose their content. The power of XML.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Tim,
This is really awesome. I liked your CakePhp tutorials; they are very easy to follow and the way you explain things are really great and make it easier for beginners. I hope you keep posting such great tutorials on your website.
I do not think you would share with us how you did this in CakePhp and I understand why, but I hope you keep posting such great easy-to-follow tutorials. Or maybe you can write a book
Good luck Tim!
Mohamed
Thank you very much for the compliments. F-E-E-D-Z was written using just three controllers – one for categories, feeds and feed items. I used SimplePie which has a component for CakePHP which made things tremendously easier. And that is in a feed action that runs off cron jobs. After re-analysis, I saw that it could have been more organized which is what I’m working on right now. But all things considered, not too bad.
BTW, I’m also working on building Craigslist-like website in CakePHP. That I will be posting the source here when complete so keep in touch.