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.

Today, I’m introducing a refresh of the SimplePie logo and the most visible part of its brand. I’m calling this new branding style SimplePie Neue. This was originally posted to the SimplePie NG blog. The Icon I designed the original SimplePie logo back in 2005. At the time, Web 2.0 and Ajax were brand-new things to most web developers. Mac OS X “Tiger” 10.4 was the latest OS running on my 17” PowerBook G4, and while the hard glossy feel hadn’t yet taken over the Internet, shadows and gradients definitely had.

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.