1:38pm on March 28th, 2009
As part of my new WordPress theme, I’ve added a basic Xbox Live XML feed processor; it’s basically doing the following:
- A PHP script running via a cron job (outside of my web directory) grabs an Xbox Live XML data feed from Duncan Mackenzie’s site (my raw feed).
- I then extract the few bits of data I want to keep using the in-built PHP SimpleXML extension, (I’m just grabbing my Gamerscore and status info for the moment) and then dumps it into a MySQL database.
- The WordPress front-end will then query the database on each page load rather than hammering the raw feed directly (this should hopefully save Duncan some bandwidth, plus if the feed ever falls over, I’ve still got some usable data kicking around).
- The cron job runs every 30 minutes or so (it was running every 2hrs or so while testing) – if the last update time is over 30mins then there’s something dodgy with the feed. Oh yeah, I’m using cPanel 11, which makes setting up a cron job to run a PHP script a breeze.
Admittedly there’s nothing very complicated going on, but getting it working without too much fuss deserves some lovely achievement points I think 
In the future I’ll probably look at using some of the available game data, but this is enough to keep me going for now.
Tags: cron, xbox, XML
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1:22pm on March 28th, 2009
Hurrah, just upload my first attempt at a WordPress theme – seems to be working at the moment. Still a lot of very rough edges but the basics are there.
The Xbox Live data is currently querying a test database (so a few hours out of date) – so just need to hook that up to the proper data and we should be good. I’ve written a few notes on it so I’ll publish those in a sec.
The search form on the right is a bit broken for now.
I’ve also removed the Twitter feed – it was quite slow as it was fetching the RSS feed directly on each page request (naughty), so planning on doing a proper job on that before adding it back.
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11:11am on March 22nd, 2009
After a bit of a false start yesterday – we’re back up and running (I think a dodgy plugin fucked something up, so I’ve reinstalled WordPress from scratch to be on the safe side).
This default theme/layout really has to go – it’s next in the (long) list of things to start working on.
The Twitter RSS feed ‘processor’ seems to be working fairly well (although seems to be quite slow displaying updates) – I’ve just dumped it in the header for now, butt ugly but will do for the time being.
Right, going to shut up and start removing some of the default ‘hello world’ crap WordPress comes with by default.
Tags: first post
Posted in Random chat, Site development | 1 Comment »
