Watch a FTP server with RSS
I was recently collaborating with a friend on a little project where we used an FTP server to store and exchange files. It worked well, but I found myself frustrated that I had to manually check the server for new files or wait for a heads-up email from my friend.
“What I really need”, thought I, “is an RSS feed that tells me when files are added or changed.”
After a bit of searching, I didn’t find anything that fit what I was looking for. For some reason the world hasn’t been anticipating my needs lately. (Somebody check on that, will you?)
So I decided to write a PHP script to get the job done. I’m not a PHP guru, but the task was straight-forward and I had something usable in short order.
Now that I have the script working fairly well for multiple FTP servers, I have written a tutorial on xml.com that shares the code and shows how it works:
The script is intentionally generic, but it could easily be tailored and used for more specific means or specific servers. If you find it useful, have cool modifications to it, or (like as not) find a bug, please let me know. I’d love to hear from you.
April 14th, 2006 at 19:53
I’m in the same situation. I have an ftp server that my friend and I use to exchange and store stuff too. And I also would like an RSS feed to show us when it gets updated. However, I am way less of a PHP guru than you are, and I can’t get the script to work on my server. Is there any way you can help me? I could just use template PHP code where I can just enter in the FTP host, username, password, etc. That would help so much! My problem is that I got errors on lines 165, 83, and 147 in my ftp_monitor.php file. Thanks in advance for your help!