There are many kinds of barcode formats out there to cater the types or amount of data you are trying to encode. However if you are just starting out for a bit of familiarization, generating 1D barcodes with PHP couldn’t be simpler with the free (for non-commercial use) PHP Barcode Generator class.

Extract the ZIP and use the following line to generate a barcode in a Code 39 barcode format encoding the string A1B2C3D3.

<div>
   <img src="html/image.php?code=code39&amp;o=1&amp;dpi=72&amp;t=80&amp;r=1&amp;rot=0&amp;text=A1B2C3D3&amp;f1=Arial.ttf&amp;f2=10&amp;a1=&amp;a2=&amp;a3=" alt="Barcode" />
</div>

Some key parameters:

For a more detailed explanation of each parameters and configurations, please refer to the barcode generator GUI tool bundled in the ZIP archive.

Have a nice day.

The post Generating Simple 1D Barcodes with PHP appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

require_once('simplepie.inc'); 

$webfeed = "http://mywordpressblog.com/index.php?feed=rss2";
$feed = new SimplePie();
$feed->set_feed_url($webfeed);
// $feed->set_cache_location("./cache_folder");	//set your own cache folder; default ./cache
// $feed->set_cache_duration(1800);	//cache duration in number of minutes; default 3600
$feed->init();
$feed->handle_content_type();

echo '<ul>';

foreach ($feed->get_items(0, 3) as $key => $item) {
	
  echo '<li>';
  echo '<a href="'. $item->get_permalink() .'">'. $item->get_title() .'</a>';
  echo '</li>';
  // $item->get_description() to get the teaser
  // $item->get_date('F jS, Y') to get the date formatted using php date()

}
echo '</ul>';

A thing to note here is the foreach loop in line 13 controls how many items you would like to retrieve from the feed. In the example above, it’s set to read three feed items (stated as 3) starting from the first item (stated as 0).

One of the advantages of using SimplePie is performance. SimplePie is configured to grab and cache the feed so that the server doesn’t have to fetch them every time the webpage is loaded. By default, SimplePie stores its cache in a directory called “cache” with a cache duration of an hour. So it’s advisable to create this directory with a correct permission assigned in advance. These default settings can be overridden very easily.

Besides standalone code, you can also find a handful of SimplePie plugins that were built for major CMS such as Joomla! or Drupal. With web feeds becoming quite common today, you can use SimplePie in many creative ways for instance to fetch Tweets, Flickr photos or cool products from eBay.

The post Quickly Fetch Web Feeds with SimplePie appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.