SitePoint.com

Recent Blog Posts

Blogs » Archive for October 20th, 2005

---

Google Update Update

by Dan Thies

Yes, Google is updating, changing, shifting, call it anything you like but don’t call it dancing. So what’s happening? Search results are shifting around like mad, that’s what’s happening. What does it mean? I can’t tell you until it stops moving, which may take another couple weeks.

We’ve been watching this since about last Friday, and my phone has been ringing off the hook. Everyone who thinks I called the November 2003 update correctly is waiting for me to pull another rabbit out of my hat… I can’t promise a rabbit, but I will have an opinion once this thing settles down and we can look at what’s changed.

Right now, it’s not over, and we can’t do anything but watch, or more appropriately, do something productive. Unfortunately, it’s my job to watch these things, so I press on….

As does Matt Cutts, director of search quality at Google and the man who must:

1. pretend that he isn’t GoogleGuy
2. direct this kind of thing to happen in the first place
3. deal with all the positive and negative feedback
4. direct the inevitable adjustments
5. make an effort to explain all this to the webmaster community without actually explaining it.

Matt is posting “weather reports” on his blog, and that’s a …

Thursday, October 20th, 2005 | Posted in Search Engine Marketing | 8 Comments »

PHP Collaboration Project official home

by Kevin Yank

At the risk of turning this into a PHP Collaboration Project linkblog, it looks like the official home of the project for now will be here: PHP Collaboration Project.

A video introduction, public forums and an overview of the project goals are up, along with PCP-related headlines from around the Web. No feeds yet, though.

Thursday, October 20th, 2005 | Posted in PHP | 5 Comments »

SimpleXML and namespaces

by Kevin Yank

There’s a lot about SimpleXML, PHP5’s new API for accessing the contents of XML documents, in SitePoint’s recently-published book No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP, but one thing it doesn’t cover is how to use SimpleXML with a document that makes use of XML Namespaces.

Take this document, for example–a simplified RSS 1.0 feed:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf=”http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#”
xmlns=”http://purl.org/rss/1.0/” xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”>
<channel rdf:about=”http://www.sitepoint.com/”>
<title>SitePoint.com</title>
<link>http://www.sitepoint.com/</link>
<description>SitePoint is the natural place to go to grow your online business.</description>
<items>
<rdf:Seq>
<rdf:li rdf:resource=”http://www.sitepoint.com/article/take-command-ajax” />
</rdf:Seq>
</items>
</channel>
<item rdf:about=”http://www.sitepoint.com/article/take-command-ajax”>
<title>Take Command with AJAX</title>
<link>http://www.sitepoint.com/article/take-command-ajax</link>
<description>Want to get a bang out of your AJAX artillery?</description>
<dc:date>2005-10-14T04:00:00Z</dc:date>
</item>
</rdf:RDF>

In PHP5, here’s how you might think to use SimpleXML’s API to get at the date of every item in the feed:

$feed = simplexml_load_file(’http://www.sitepoint.com/recent.rdf’);
foreach ($feed->item as $item) {
echo $item->date;
}

But this won’t work, because the date element has a namespace prefix (<dc:date>), so it can’t be accessed …

Thursday, October 20th, 2005 | Posted in PHP | 15 Comments »