Question

I was looking for a solution on caching RSS feeds in PHP. I was planning to do the parsing with Magpie RSS parser (http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/). But then how could I go about caching feeds (in case sometimes feed provider won’t let me read the same feed, etc.)?

Regards.

Answer 1

• You fetch the feed. Save the results to a database or file (serialize()).
• When it is time to fetch the feed again,
• Check if the file exists, if not create and update
• If the file exists, check the the timestamp of the db or file.
• if it is older than your threshold (say 20 secondsm) then you refetch, otherwise you just return the cached feed.
• If you can’t fetch the feed for whatever reason, you return the cached version up to a timeout period (say 20 minutes)

Voila caching.