Thanks again  Dave and Freddy,
If I need to trace I will probably use Freddy's second suggestion, I like idea that it places the trace in a div within the html.

I had to do a few errands, but there done now time to play

Glad to be of service   Hitchhikers.... 

Take a look at NetBeans some time though, it's a very nice thing.  I tend to do all my code in editors but sometimes running it though the IDE helps finds problems I might have overlooked.

will do Freddy, just can't do on this machine atm for my hard drive space is near full.
once I build my new case I will be using this ssd for my other mobo.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
      curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
what  parameters are true and 0 setting? I tried to do a search but unable to find

I had to cut the code down Dave and change some things, but thanks to you I got a ruff working php twitter feed on my site 

here is what I'm using atm
<?php

function Twitter_feed($path){
        $ch = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$path);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR,1);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15);
        $retValue = curl_exec($ch);                      
        curl_close($ch);
        return $retValue;
}
$sXML = Twitter_feed('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/ScriptedIntell.rss');
$oXML = new SimpleXMLElement($sXML);
foreach($oXML->channel->item as $oDocuments){
        
        $published_on =$oDocuments->pubDate;
$description = $oDocuments->description;

        echo $published_on . "<br>" . $description . "<br>" .  "<br><br>" ;
}
?>