I think most of us (the people who read this blog) keep up with the times by monitoring RSS feeds or reading books, I know that’s how I do it. But over the past few years my RSS reader has become more and more bloated. From time to time you may run through your feeds and delete the older ones, one’s that haven’t posted in a while or people who just complain about the government. But they’re all still valuable!

I try very hard to never delete an RSS feed. In fact, not too long ago I noticed that my feed menu had started to run off the page (I use Firefox to manage my RSS), so I got a bigger monitor to compensate; because you never really know where that bit of genius, that air of brilliance will come from. It could be from Eric Meyer, David Shea or from your random Swatkins blog.

I first noticed that I was neglecting my feeds when I saw 2 cycles of A List Apart and at least 10 CSS-Tricks posts/screencasts whiz past me, and that I hadn’t made a blog post in over a month (not cool with that at all). We’re all very busy at work, some more than others, but we still need to keep up with what’s happening in the industry.

Many times when I’m busy and I look at that long list of RSS feeds in front of me I just let out a :sigh: and say “I’ll just check a couple since I’m busy, and then maybe some more tomorrow when it calms down.” It had been happening a lot lately so I came to the conclusion that it’s not going to calm down, and that it’s time to get back into my old RSS groove. It’s really not that difficult to take some time out of every day for a little news reading. In fact, the ALA news days usually take the most time.

Many of us get to work, have our coffee, sit down, chat a little and before you know it, 20-30 minutes have gone by and you haven’t really “started” work yet. This is the time I use to read my news.

Not every blog/site you follow will update content on the same day. If you run through them every morning before you start your “heads-down” development/design you’ll find 1, maybe 2 sites that have made updates.

Keeping up with your RSS is really important, especially if your one of those psycho/learn everything about everything Web designer (like me P). I find that at least checking your feeds once a day, or even every other day can save you tons of time, energy and frustration in the long run.

But that’s just me hoping that I haven’t lost too many readers because of my month off ).

How do YOU keep up with your news?

I did some digging around after that and came across a short post on iPhoneAppr about how to auto-detect a browser based on the user agent (what is essentially the browser).

The HTTP User Agent

When you visit a web page, your user agent changes based on the media you’re using. So, right now, if you’re using Firefox 2 your user agent string looks something like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14)
Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14

and if you’re on an iPhone it will look something like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like
Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3

As you can see, the user agent string has some key difference. The iPhone agent actually says "iPhone" in it. With this in mind we can use a neat little function built into PHP 5 called stripos to search the user agent and return some code (like code to send someone to a mobile version of a web site).

Let’s just get into it shall we? Here’s the PHP:

<?php
//setting the variables
ipod = stripos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"iPod");
$iphone = stripos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"iPhone");

//detecting device
if ($ipod == true || $iphone == true){
    echo "iPhone or iPod";
    } else {
    echo "Screen";
}
?>

Stripos is a function that takes 2 arguments. The first is what you want to search (the haystack) and the second is what you want to search for (the needle). If the needle is found in the haystack it will return "true", and if not, it will return false. An important thing to note about stripos is that it’s case insensitive[edit], so if you have some initial trouble, check your spacing and maybe try trim().

Trouble I had

In the PHP manual it says to use === when checking the value (which is for an exact match, true=true), but for some reason that didn’t work for me so I used == (match, but not exact so true=true & true=1 for boolean values). It’s usually just a spacing issue, but I’m not real sure this time. Feel free to tell me I’m wrong.

view live demo

I like this, it’s pretty easy, light, and useful if you just want an iPhone/iPod interface.