News page: major update
Lunarpages says that someone hacked their DNS, which appears to have disrupted my site’s access to weather.gov, and the various weather services derived from it. During the investigation to see if anything else was affected, I noticed that my news page wasn’t working right. After some further investigation, I found that the format of CNN’s and Yahoo’s news RSS feeds had changed. So, I looked at my code, and found that it used old-style (PHP4) XML parsing (the expat parser, to be exact). Today, I rewrote that part of the code to use DOMDocument, after discovering that the simple XML reader in PHP doesn’t appear to handle these files. Now, CNN works, and BBC still works (it worked the old way, too). Unfortunately, it appears that Yahoo’s changes are incompatible with my format, so I have–at least temporarily–removed Yahoo! as a news choice.