Some days have passed with no updates. It took me a bit, but I decided to base the new reader off of lastRSS instead of Magpie RSS; while the modularity and much more comprehensive nature of Magpie’s tag matching is nice, I didn’t need something so complex–rather, I simply wanted a quick, simple reader.

I was also taken by the method by which lastRSS creates the data–it parses the feed and then places it into an associative array, which I hadn’t originally considered doing. The original reader that I’d written used an inelegant method that simply matched tags, and then dropped them directly into the page.

With the array method, however, it’ll be a bit easier for me to create a formatting script that places everything appropriately into the template, which I’ll be working on now. In the meantime, here’s the file for the reader: aeRSS 0.2.20070916

(Edited to add a few small corrections/tweaks.)

Everything should be working at this point, with the exception of the “Feeds” part in the navigation sidebar. I’m re-writing the PHP code I’d made a long while back that pulled and parsed RSS feeds; this time, instead of writing in a vacuum, I’ll be looking at two other readers (Magpie RSS and LastRSS) to see how they work.I’ve also swapped the primary domain for this site to marqhwang.com; I’ll be adding another redirected TLD sometime in the near future as well.

As far as WordPress goes, I’m using it as the content management system, but I’ll have to admit, there are some annoyances I have with it; one of the most irritating is that on any page, it doesn’t play well with the DIV tags, converting them into P tags instead; I probably should have looked into this before I started coding everything, but by the time I realized what was up, I’d already done a lot of the work.

Other future adds: modal windows for images; subdomains for certain types of content.