It would appear that this is the season for SimplePie screencasts! In the past two days, I’ve discovered a few new SimplePie-related screencasts, and I want to share them (and a couple of older ones) with you.

• Introduction to SimplePie — Ryan Parman gives you a solid once-over about setting up SimplePie, merging feeds together, auto-discovery, and a few other popular features.
• Adding RSS Content with SimplePie — Chris Coyier discusses more of the basics from another developer’s perspective.
• Quick Tip: Super SimplePie! — Niki Brown quickly shows you how to drop RSS content into an existing page.
• CodeIgniter and SimplePie — Elliot Haughin shows how to integrate SimplePie into your CodeIgniter projects.
• Extending SimplePie to Parse Unique RSS Feeds — Jeffrey Way dives a bit deeper and talks about how to extend SimplePie’s functionality while playing with a little jQuery.

You can find even more tips, tricks, tutorials, and screencasts in the SimplePie wiki.

Although SimplePie Live! was a cool concept, and something that I would have liked to see be successful, I simply haven’t had the time to put into it for nearly a year and a half now. One of these days I’d like to relaunch it when I have more time and resources to put into it, because I believe it could be a useful tool if executed properly.

That being said, we’ll be shutting down the SimplePie Live! service in the next couple of weeks. This will be the only notice we’ll provide (which probably isn’t a big deal because there are nearly zero users). Instead, I would recommend either using SimplePie (for PHP) or a service like Google AJAX Feed API.

SimplePie 1.1.3 is now available (like 1.1.2, “core” plugin will be updated soon). This is a bugfix-only release that resolves the one major issue that 1.1.2 created (gzip decoding errors while using fsockopen()), and fully resolves the other major issue that 1.1.2 didn’t fully address (a workaround of a libxml2 bug).

Grab the latest release to upgrade!