The Flickr photo feed
I’m not entirely sure whether this problem was a result of the PHP 5.2 upgrade and SimpleXML becoming more particular about namespaces or Flickr simply changing the namespace string in their feed. I believe it was the latter. In short, my code stopped working because the namespace lacked a trailing slash (/). It would’ve been great if Flickr had notified everyone about this first.
The code looked something like this:
<?php
$flickr_rss = simplexml_load_file('http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/
photos_public.gne?id=49198866@N00&format=rss_200');
foreach ($flickr_rss->channel->item as $item)
{
$link = (string) $item->link;
$media = $item->children('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss');
$thumb = $media->thumbnail->attributes();
$url = (string) $thumb['url'];
$width = (string) $thumb['width'];
$height = (string) $thumb['height'];
$title = (string) $item->title;
// display image here
}
?>
Note the namespace listed in $item->children('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss');. It’s lacking a trailing slash. This was never a problem before, but it seems that the Flickr feed changed to include a trailing slash, so SimpleXML was no longer able to properly get the data. I simply changed it to http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/ (note the trailing slash), and all worked fine.
Blogroll sorting
This was more than likely a result of the upgrade to PHP 5.2, though I can’t be sure. My blog sorting code worked like this:
<?php
// sort by name
$name = array();
foreach ($blogs as $k => $v)
{
$name[$k] = $v['name'];
}
array_multisort($name, SORT_ASC, $blogs);
?>
Unfortunately, after the upgrade, this no longer worked. I had to add the SORT_STRING flag as a parameter to array_multisort() so that the line now reads:
<?php array_multisort($name, SORT_ASC, SORT_STRING, $blogs); ?>
And that fixed it.
