…so the other day i figured out that the parser i used so far (LastRss) was not able to read Atom feeds. Since our beloved Blogger only publishes atom feeds i needed to find a cure for the problem.
One easy solution is to ask FeedBurner to convert between rss and atom, which works pretty well, but better not mess with the Gods, lets do it the proper way.
Then i came across this blog entry, that compared some of the existing solutions. Finally i chose SimplePie, which works brilliantly ever since. To have an overview of the solutions, here is my little comparison:

LastRss
+ simple
+ fast
+ small footprint
- no support for Atom
- website looks interesting recently (says: It works!)

Zend_Feed
+ part of Zend Framework
+ supports Rss and Atom
+ well documented
- supports PHP5 only

Magpie
+ supports Rss and Atom (“with few exceptions” :))
+ long time out there
- long time out there :) seems like it has never really grown up

SimplePie
+ seems like it supports everything
+ well documented
+ fresh and stable project
- one heavy includefile if it bothers you (350K)

XML_RSS (Pear)
- i am not sure, but i think only supports Rss feeds
- Pear dependencies
- “Oldest open bug: 326 days”

RSS_PHP
- supports Rss only
- PHP 5 only (i know, i know, we should all live in a PHP5 world, but we dont)
- “A commercial version (v3) of the RSS Parser / XML Parser for PHP [rss_php] is now released and available for download. This release fixes a couple of tiny bugs and adds far more functionality…Our original version (RSS_PHP v1) is still freely available.” - so you can get a buggy version for free, the commercial version costs 15USD.

This is an archive post. It represents a point of view in the past. Facts might have changed, events might be interpreted differently as of today. Links might be broken.