Handling RSS With Perl Scripts

Besides PHP, there are other server-side languages available, such as Perl. You can find more information about Perl at www.cpan.org.

If you're more familiar with Perl than PHP, take a look at RSS Fetcher, which is a Perl script that lets you convert RSS feeds and display their headlines in Web pages. Actually, the RSS content is stored in text files that you can include in Web pages using floating frames or server side includes (SSI).

You can pick up RSS Fetcher at http://cgi.resourceindex.com/detail/05142.html (Figure 9.33).

Figure 9.33. RSS Fetcher uses Perl scripts.

Another Perl script is rss2rss (www.aaronland.info/perl/rss/rss2rss). This one takes a group of RSS feeds and combines them into a single RSS feed.

Although most server-side RSS-to-HTML applications are written in PHP, you can find software available in just about every server-side language, from Perl to .NET. Just use a Web search engine like Google to locate what you're looking forit's out there.