Professional Web APIs with PHP. eBay, Google, PayPal, Amazon, FedEx, Plus Web Feeds

Overview

The process of consuming web feeds was discussed in the last chapter; here the process of producing those feeds is examined in detail. Producing feeds, from a technical perspective, is simply taking the content you already have, and instead of encapsulating it in HTML, encapsulating it in XML following a specified format.

This chapter covers the following:

• Why feeds are important

• Standard feed formats

• Testing feeds

• 1Caching

• Blog feeds

• Trackbacks

The chapter then provides a simple real-world example of providing feeds for a sample retail store.