Build a menu bar on-the-fly with JavaScript

Its not necessary to use either PHP or SHTML to include a dynamic menubar in a set of web pages - you can do it with JavaScript.

First define arrays containing all the links and the link text you want for the links - make certain the two arrays have the same number of elements!

Then have a loop that goes through these arrays, displaying them on the screen in order. You can do a bit of string testing to work out what page you're on and have that link displayed differently - perhaps in bold or just not underlined. Output all the HTML using document.write

Here's an example:

var textArray=new Array('home','news','people','places','views', 'faq');
var linksArray=new Array('index.html','news.html','people.html','places.html','views.html','faq.html');

for (i=0;i < textArray.length; i++) {
  var str = window.location.toString();
  var urlbits = str.split('/');
  if (urlbits[urlbits.length-1]!=linksArray[i]) {
    document.write(''+textArray[i]+'');
  } else {
    document.write(''+textArray[i]+'');
  }
  if (i!=textArray.length-1) document.write(' | ');
}

Note how the last line in the loop misses off the delimiter for the last item.

Save this JavaScript in a separate file - something like menubar.js - and include it in the same place in all of your HTML pages using a conventional link to an external JavaScript file:

<script type="text/javascript" src="menubar.js"></script>

My links here are just straightforward links, but they could equally be styled bullet list items, buttons, images, whatever.

Parsing RSS with Dubin Core using PHP5

With the built-in XML functions of PHP5, its now pretty straightforward to parse well-formed RSS data, eg:

$link = $node->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue;

But when using getElementsByName you run into problems if you want to grab data in Dublin Core fields - this won't work:

$creator = $node->getElementsByTagName('dc:creator')->item(0)->nodeValue;

To solve this you have to use the getElementsByTagNameNS function and declare the namespace you are using - obviously in this case Dublin Core:

$creator = $node->getElementsByTagNameNS('http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/','creator')->item(0)->nodeValue;