From the simple and useful usage of XML that you may face everyday is creating images based on XML data, with the new SimpleXML API in PHP5 this process is becoming more and more easy. Ben Ramsey talked about this issue in his blog and experimented how to create an image from XML data using Feedburner API to regenrate the FeedCount image. A simple cron job running once a day will update this image daily and keep the information up to date.

It’s not really a “problem,” but FeedBurner’s FeedCountTM image is a rigid 88 pixels wide, and I wanted to include it on my homepage under the “syndicate” heading, an area that I’ve defined in my template as having only 80 pixels in width. The 88 pixels were throwing things off, so I used the width attribute of the HTML img tag to solve the problem. Unfortunately, it just squeezes the image, making the text in it appear fuzzy.