Tom Morris is pulling his hair out dealing with XML character encoding issues. I've gone through this myself. I found that the SimplePie feed parser has great logic for dealing with this, so I adapted it to my needs in my PHP class XMLParseIntoArray. I think I've expanded on SimplePie's approach a bit, but it's still a work in progress. YMMV. Hope this helps.
Use a block like this in PHP code to detect whether or not it's running in command line mode as opposed to web server script mode.
Judging from what little buzz there was, I think that's probably true, but I'm interested in others' thoughts.
tecosystems Redesign | alexking.org: Another good post by Alex King, this one about developing a new theme (and also about mixing business and friendship).
Truly re-inspired by Dave's injection of interest into mobile news reading, I've been tinkering with my own custom solution. Since I subscribe to NewsGator, I'm using the NewsGator API for some backend, but I've done quite a bit of plumbing myself.
The most important things I wanted to be able to do were (1) to be able to mark posts read (and since I'm using NewsGator, that "read" status synchronizes across all my aggregator clients on different computers) and (2) to fix the annoying nonsense characters introduced by idiotic feed generators -- that includes the New York Times and Washington Post.
The results are starting to shape up nicely.
Here's the main page I see after I sign in.
And notice that in FeedDemon, "Chávez" is screwy, but I've got it right.
I've completed a major rewrite of my OPML browser, Optimal.