I was trying to find something to refresh my knowledge of Economics and came up with this project, written by some students at Clemson University.

So I went ahead and added Slashdot, Freshmeat and Linux Today news feeds to the site, as you can see on the right The sites make these feeds available by serving an XML file, called a Resource Description File Site Summary (RSS). All you have to do is parse this file, and apply some formatting. This is quite easily done in PHP. I got ready-made PHP scripts for these sites from here. An excellent article on how to use PHP to parse XML RSS feeds can be found here.

So I spent quite a while yesterday working on my website. It took me quite a while to get the back-end stuff and layout sorted. I opted for a table-based layout which I wanted to avoid because of text-based browsers, but i think it looks quite alright.

I haven’t added much content yet but I do plan on getting to it ASAP. I’m currently working on a PHP/MySQL-based bookmark manager so that I can store my links (with categories) in a DB. I’m doing this because I dislike the fact that whenever I come across an interesting link on the web, I have to bookmark it in the current browser. Since I switch browsers all the time I keep losing my links. Hopefully this way I can quickly add any link to the DB on my website whenever I need it. I’m getting to learn some PHP along the way which is great
One other advantage of this top-left-center table-based layout is that I can add another column to the right-hand side whenever I wish to, possible for RSS feeds from other websites or blogs.