During one of my random dreams of how to become an internet millionaire, I thought about displaying the top youtube videos on an aesthetically pleasing backdrop.
While I’m not feeling that artsie right now, I did code together a quick script to do this using SimpleXML:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 | <?php function embed($src) { return '<object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="' . $src . '"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="' . $src . '" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>'; } $xml = simplexml_load_file('http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/standardfeeds/most_popular'); echo '<h1>Most Popular YouTube Videos</h1>'; print '<h2>' . date('F jS, Y', strtotime($xml->updated)) . '</h2>'; echo '<table>'; foreach ($xml->entry as $entry) { $link = str_replace('watch?v=', 'v/', $entry->link[0]['href']); echo '<tr><td>'; echo embed($link) . '<br />'; echo "<a href='$entry->link[0]['href']'>{$entry->title}</a>"; echo "</td></tr>"; } echo '</table>'; |
Real brief analysis: The function embed() is used to generate the code to embed the video. The first step is loading the file with simplexml_load_file(). (Do keep in mind to make sure you can remotely open a file in php.ini). Next, I generated the title and created a header based on the last time the xml file was updated. The final step was to create a table and generate a loop to display each embedded video with a link to its source (see usage of the embed() function there? yeah….).