php DOMDocument::loadXML & xpath

class helloAction extends sfAction
{
  // data values
  // $newsitems -> [ [link, title, desc]* ] 
  public function execute()
  {
    $rssurl = 'http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/tech';
    $rssdata = $this->url_get_contents($rssurl);
    $rssdom = DOMDocument::loadXML($rssdata);

    // fetch values from dom and put into array of [link,title,desc] arrays
    $newsitems = array();
    $xpath = new DOMXPath($rssdom);
    foreach ($xpath->query("//rss/channel/item") as $item)
    {
      $link        = $this->get_element_value($item, 'link');
      $title       = $this->get_element_value($item, 'title');
      $description = $this->get_element_value($item, 'description');
      $newsitems[] = array($link, $title, $description);
    }

    // pass this struct to the template
    $this->newsitems = $newsitems;
  }

  // note: no error handling yet
  private function url_get_contents($url)
  {
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $result;
  }
  private function get_element_value($node, $itemname)
  {
    return $node->getElementsByTagName($itemname)->item(0)->nodeValue;
  }
}