That’s the cleanest source of data I’ve seen so far – just a plain table.

The NBC olympics one loads the data in arrays so that you can sort it by different categories.

http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/torino2006/medals

What’s the best way to snag data in PHP? Does it have good support for regular expressions, or am I going to have to write a script to troll through and manually parse it out of the table?

Here’s the way you do it… First download and install the CG-PowerBack:

http://www.chait.net/index.php?p=238/

(The latest version for 1.5.13 works fine for WordPress 2.0) – install those plugins with the instructions given

In your sidebar.php – add the following: (Replace “Title you want” with whatever titling method you use inside your sidebar. I use <h2> tags…)


<div id="medalcount"> Title you want
<?php
$feedUrl = "http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/torino2006/medals/rss.xml";

$feedOut = getSomeFeed($feedUrl, $maxItemsPerFeed=1, $showDetails=true, $cacheName="feed-medalcount", $filterCat='',$tLimit = -1, $dLimit = -1, $noHTML = false,
$showTime = true, $feedStyle = 0, $noTitle = true, $showTimeGMT = false, $titleImages = false, $multiSiteTitle=false,$makeRSS=false, $rssName="CG-FeedRead Multifeed", $rssLink="http://www.chait.net/");

if ($feedOut)
echo $feedOut;
?>
</div>

In your CSS file, if you want to get rid of the titles so it blends in better, include these lines:

.medalcount .feedDescription {
display: none;
}

.medalcount .feedItemTitle {
margin: 0.5em 0 0 0;
padding:0.5em;
font-size:0.9em;
}

.medalcount .feedItem tr.last {
display: none;
}
.medalcount .meta {
font-size: 0.9em;
padding: 0.5em;
}

That will get rid of the “Powered by Chevy Tahoe” line – along with the other lines, but will still link to Yahoo for the main medal count page.

This solution works for me, so I’m not interested in building a custom plugin just for the next two weeks. When the worldcup comes along, just pray that Yahoo has an RSS feed for that medalcount, and this would be very simple to implement for that too (provided they throw a nice HMTL table in their RSS feed again)

I haven’t yet seen if the CG-FeedReader will automatically update the medalcount because I haven’t seen Yahoo update it yet. I will know tomorrow if it actually updates the feed. 😛

You can see it working in my sidebar here:
http://www.ryebrye.com/blog/

You may have to expand the menu for it if it isn’t expanded by default for you.

Ryan

Any help is appreciated