I ♥ MATH

I have a pretty solid REST request library that I use to talk to most of the 3rd-Party API's. It's the core of the twitter library, and I use the same base to connect to Flickr. So when I decided to embed my Google Reader Starred items, I thought it would be a natural fit.

Since there does not seem to be an official API for Reader, I tried just aiming at the public feed URL. After struggling for hours to get the right character encoding output, I started trying to convert the ATOM response to other text formats, hoping for a magic cure. Not a very productive journey.

In the end, I decided to go back to the Simplepie class, and I had the feed displaying in minutes. Disappointed that I did not have any custom code from the result, I decided to at least create a helper that might be reusable and at least takes the junk work out of getting the feed object.