A few days ago I started looking deeper into the Google Code APIs and threw a few experiments using the Google Documents List Data API. Unfortunately, the only library they have for the third version of their protocol is written in Java. There is a PHP wrapper for the first version of the protocol, but it totally depends on the Zend Framework. Here’s a little code snippet for logging into a...
Inspired: Web Design Showcase October 2009
Browsing the Internet, reading Twitter streams, RSS feeds… I see billions of websites everyday (kidding) and there’s lots of stuff out there that inspires me everyday, so I’ve decided to run a new series called “Inspired” where I’ll post the most interesting stuff I come across (monthly, weekly, yearly, I don’t know yet, maybe I’ll close this down...
Cloud Tips: Rediscovering Amazon CloudFront
So, three months later I realized I wasn’t using CloudFront at all! Huh? I took a deeper look at my Amazon Web Services bill last month and found out that I wasn’t even charged for CloudFront! But hey, I delivered all my static content through CloudFront distributions from S3 and I had a subdomain mapped to those distributions and everything was working fine (thought I).. Let’s...
While Everyone's Been Waiting for WordPress 2.9
I’ve been using it! Okay, so I’m not going to talk about all the great stuff coming up in 2.9, all the bugs they’ve fixed, all the features they’ve added, no. I’d just like to tell you about my experience running a step ahead of everybody else. When WordPress has made the switch from 2.7 to 2.8 I’ve decided to risk it and take the 2.9 path. I’m not sure...
WordPress: The template_redirect Hook Returns 404
This is a real quick one. I’ve started using the W3 Total Cache plugin a few days ago which I’m totally satisfied with. Unlike the WP Super Cache plugin, W3TC can keep the caches in memory via memcached, serve the static content through CDNs. The guys at W3 Edge promised to add Amazon CloudFront compatibility which I’m very excited about. As we all know (I guess) Mashable is...
Automated Twitter Bot in PHP: Remote Control
Hope you’ve all read the first part of this series – Create Your Own Automated Twitter Robot in PHP and got your own prototype up and running. Today we’ll be adding a remote control feature to our robot. It’ll be working through direct messages and running in crontab every 5 minutes or so. You can extend this as far as you want (adding retweet capabilities...
Cloud Tips: Automatic Backups to S3
In a previous post about backing up EC2 MySQL to an Amazon S3 bucket we covered dumping MySQL datasets, compressing them and uploading to S3. After a few weeks test-driving the shell script, I came up with a new version that checks, fixes and optimizes all tables before generating the dump. This is pretty important as mysqldump will fail on whatever step would cause an error (data corruption...
Create Your Own Automated Twitter Robot in PHP
The ultimate guide to creating your own personalized twitterfeed clone! Kidding… Actualy this is just a mockup, a simple prototype, which is way too fresh for any actual use. We’ll take this forward step by step. I’m not going to give out all my sources but I’ll guide you through authentication, rss lookup, parsing, thanking for retweets, and shooting random stuff at...
Twitter API: PIN-based OAuth Using PHP
A few weeks ago we discussed Automated Serverside Tweeting Using OAuth (read this before going on) and I kept looking deeper into security issues, so I found a way to make things slightly simpler. If you played with the OAuth Clients page on Twitter, you know that there are two ways of authentication – web application and client application. Also, I found out that there’s a...
WordPress: Recent Comments by Category
Yet another WordPress code snippet ;) I’ve got two major categories in my upcoming project – Blogs and Arts. In the archive, somewhere in the sidebar, I’d like to output the recent comments only from the chosen category, excluding the ones that are from the other category. The most difficult part here is to figure out proportions, because running this hack recursively may eat up...