Here is a snippet of code that I wish I had when I needed to write a small routine to output a PHP RSS feed.
RSS Feeds are XML-like so they need to be carefully crafted.
1.) Setup the main header of the rss feed. Remember to carefully escape all of your text going into string
fields using htmlentities().
Created a personalized Robot Agent, based on Silva Tech’s flexible data extraction, reporting and crawling framework (DERC Framework, a Silva Tech Solutions framework) that has saved Mr. Gordon countless hours of monitoring his target system himself and responding to the monotonous events. The agent was setup on a very specific schedule, authenticated into a third party application system, searched for a very specific criteria and automatically submitted data. The agent monitored and reacted differently to a certain set of resulting events that were returned from the application system. The Crawl Agent would then email Mr. Gordon and shut itself down. Mr. Gordon could easily control his personalized DERC Framework agent, from a custom built secure web interface. The DERC Framework is a very flexible proprietary data extraction, reporting and crawling framework that Mr. Silva has been building upon and refining for five years.
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Silva Tech Solutions was the complete technology consultant on the “over-the-road” based freight start-up company called EverythingFreight LLC. We managed and provided all of the IT services, from building a custom “Smarty Template” freight auction website to building a highly complicated system of web crawling agents that continuously crawled and updated data from the Department of Transportation. We collected and maintained the records on one of the nations leading databases of freight and freight broker information. The system was built on a very tight budget and was specially crafted to minimize the cost of server hosting and bandwidth. The system was segmented in two tiers, a subscription website system with a minimal database architecture and the corporate data-center with the full freight database and associated statistical systems. The data-center system would upload refreshed data to the public side only as requested. This ensured that the data-center’s core product was very secure, and any (unlikely) breach of the public website would yield very little data loss. Silva Tech Solution’s data crawlers would regularly monitor and notify a customer, if their record at the Department of Transportation had changed. The intricate data crawlers also monitored the Department of Transportation site for newer registered companies and then provided the data to enterprise customers who where in the freight broker or freight sales industries. Some of the custom data feed reports were based on a circular radius around the customer’s zip-code, ensuring that the customer would only receive sales leads within their geographic area. Silva Tech Solutions created a massive array of in memory statistical models that could quickly calculate industry wide accident and safety statistics for like sized freight companies. The system would automatically detect changed company data in the master database and reload only the affected nodes back into the memory model. The models were tied to a custom graphing and reporting system, that was able to trend growth rates or trends of freight company and broker safety issues throughout the entire US. Custom PDF reports containing all of the available data on a freight company were automatically generated and stored at the data center. Customers could then search the basic subscription front end database, and then request full reports on any freight broker or hauler from the main segmented data-center database. Silva Tech Solutions was also responsible for the development of all corporate branding graphics and logos, as well as building the corporate website. We monitored all of the network traffic and were responsible for all SEO efforts to boost traffic and revenue. |