Question

i was wondering, how would i go about setting up a php code such that when someone enters a url into a form i would like to extract the name of the webpage and a photograph similar to what happens in facebook when you put a link on someones wall, you get the title of the link and picture.
Do i have to read an rss feed or what ?

Answer 1

Rss feed are XML therefore you should be able to DOM or SAX in conjunction with Xpath to retrieve these informations by hand.

Zend_Feed provides an easy way to work with feeds (either RSS or Atom).

$feed = Zend_Feed_Reader::import('http://www.planet-php.net/rdf/');
$feed->getTitle();

Concerning the preview picture, I don’t know any free and out of the box solution.

You can take a look at thumbshots.org which provides free thumbnails for websites which in DMOZ but requires a paying subscriptions for others.

You can also try http://www.guangmingsoft.net/htmlsnapshot/html2image.htm which is well know and available on Linux, but still not free.