In this second part of a five-part series on Web Services, you will learn how to install and use MagpieRSS, a popular RSS parser. This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of the book Beginning PHP and Oracle: From Novice to Professional, written by W. Jason Gilmore and Bob Bryla (Apress; ISBN: 1590597702).
- MagpieRSS MagpieRSS (Magpie for short) is a powerful RSS parser written in PHP by Kellan Elliott-McCrea. Its freely available for download via http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/ and is distributed under the GPL license. Magpie offers developers an amazingly practical and easy means for retrieving...

Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) is a captcha technology developed by Microsoft. This article will explain how it's different from other captcha systems, the benefits of using Asirra, and how to set it up on your PHP-based website.
- Unlike other types of captcha that utilize difficult text obfuscation techniques (such as Google reCaptcha), this system utilizes images of dogs and cats, such as those shown in the screen shot below: The following are the main benefits of using the Asirra captcha system: 1. It is very...

If you are planning to use PHP to create and interact with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application, then you can use the PHP Excel class. It can be a little tricky to use, however, especially for beginners. This tutorial will walk you through the basics and show you how to customize it for your own Excel implementation.
- The class is complex, and sometimes getting started on the basics is hard, because PHPExcel is a complete class that interacts not only with MS Excel but with other formats such as PDF, CSV and the OpenDocument Spreadsheet. The documentation included by the developers is broad, and does not cover...