I recently had the urge to create an forum signature from my RSS feed. My first step was to find a open source RSS parser that is done in PHP. I found a little application called MagpieRSS. This little script parses any RSS feed and puts them into an array that you can use.
I took this array and created a script to to take that data and put into an image. The code below is that script:
// Grab the magpie script
require_once('magpierss/rss_fetch.inc');
// Set this to the RSS feed you want to parse
$url="http://feeds.feedburner.com/tech-geek";
$background="sig_bg.png";
$rss = fetch_rss($url);
// create a image
$im = imagecreatefrompng($background);
//set the text colors
$textcolor = imagecolorallocate($im, 200, 200, 200);
$textcolor2 = imagecolorallocate($im, 255, 255, 255);
// Add text to the image
imagestring($im, 3, 160, 1, "Latest Posts", $textcolor2);
imagestring($im, 2, 160, 15, $rss->items[0][title], $textcolor);
imagestring($im, 2, 160, 28, $rss->items[1][title], $textcolor);
imagestring($im, 2, 160, 40, $rss->items[2][title], $textcolor);
// output the image
header("Content-type: image/png");
imagepng($im);
// Destroy the image from the servers cache
// This set is optional, but it saves quite a bit of memory by killing it
imagedestroy($im);
?>
The issue with using a dynamic php image is that many forum’s will not allow it. The fix for this is to use mod_rewrite to make it look like the file is a PNG rather than PHP. To do this you just need to create (or edit) your .htaccess file if running Apache and put the following in:
RewriteEngine on # You can use anything you would like on the line below. # Where it says sig.png is the file name you will call remotely # sig.php is the name of your script RewriteRule sig.png sig.php
To run this script all you will need to do is run http://yourserver/sig.png which will rewrite that URL to sig.php. This means that any site checking to see if the file extension is an actual image. phpBB is a popular forum that seems to love to check that the file type is a real image.
