TL;DR: How I improved the performance of case-insensitive XPath queries by 30–35%, reducing an 8× performance hit to only 4.5–5×. This was originally posted to the SimplePie NG blog. Parse-at-all-costs Most feeds are a mess. The old SimplePie “OG” took a parse-at-all-costs philosophy, and could handle many of the most broken feeds you could find — at a cost. While the early versions of SimplePie supported the letter of the RSS 2.0 specification, there were a surprising number of feeds which didn’t.

After retiring from SimplePie development in 2009, the project more or less went into maintenance mode. While I am thankful to the folks who have contributed to its development over the last 8 years, it’s time for a reboot. This was originally posted to the SimplePie NG blog. SimplePie NG is a modern, next-generation PHP package for working with syndication feeds. It is being re-written from the ground-up to take advantage of the changes that have happened in the PHP community since the SimplePie project was started back in 2004.

I didn’t know Aaron personally, so there’s no insight I can provide into the person who I’ve read people describe as “a brilliant soul”. The world is now a worse place The tech world is abuzz with the news that, at only 26 years old, Aaron Swartz decided to take his own life. I heard about it last night when I opened up Tweetbot, and saw two tweets back-to-back in my timeline: @al3x : We lost @aaronsw. — Alex Payne (@al3x) January 12, 2013.