If I were to write a script in PHP, would the script be able to load a certain web page and pull out certain pieces of information, such as blog post titles? Or would this be a better thing for, let's say, PERL to do?
it is best to use which ever you can code better.. That would be my choice.. Most of scripting languages can do what you want.. asp/php/perl etc.. stick to what you know best..
Yes, that's possible. You could either use file_get_contents() or cURLfunctions to retrieve the page, then parse it using a regular expression for example.
As far as php goes... file_get_contents is by the simplest way to get a page. But if you need to have the script login to a site, and do some other complicated web-browser type actions, curl is the way to go. All the rest is up to some smart string parsing. Stealing someones content eh?
PHP has the ability to do this. i recommend using one of the available PEAR xml parsers. For valid xhtml websites, this makes breaking em apart very easy. ive made a crawler with php before and ruby. theyve both worked good.
Haha, for personal reading, yes. I'm looking into creating my own personal "iGoogle". I already use that service, but I'd like to create something of my own, not based on RSS, just in case someone doesn't use it for their site. I think that might be a nifty way to do it.