Submitted by Keane Ingram on Tue, 03/08/2010 - 9:31am
Previously, I've used Google's search page as the homepage for my mobile phone, as it's a handy thing to have quick access to. However, the page I use most often is BBC Mobile to check on the news. It's good that the BBC provide a mobile page, and they do allow you to customise features such as location (for weather), favourite football team (to get news on them), number and order of items etc. What I didn't like though was the big splash article at the top with the day's feature on it, plus there's no way of getting rid of the 'customise' and 'search' bars.
So I decided to create a new homepage which would kill two birds with one stone. What I've done is take the BBC's RSS feeds and display the top 5 news, sport and entertainment articles on one page. Underneath this I've put a search box for Google. So now I have a shortcut on my phone which displays the top news and gives me a search option too.
It was harder than I expected to parse the BBC RSS feeds. For some reason SimpleXML wouldn't accept the feed, and I tried an RSS plugin which also rejected it. So I've manually parsed it, using regular expressions to find the relevant links. I'm fairly happy with how it works, there are some links which won't work (e.g. for Newsbeat articles, but I can't find a mobile version of those anyway).
If anyone is interested, the URL for my homepage is http://www.keanei.co.uk/bbcmobile/.
