I was working on a project lately that involved charts and graphs which had to be interactive, lightweight and somewhat complicated. I looked through quite a lot of different chart APIs, and for some time thought that I’d have to go with Open Flash Chart which is good and simple, but it was Flash. There’s nothing wrong with Flash, but Flash is what makes it more complicated to modify...
5 Awesome Links for Web Designers & Developers
It’s July and it’s so damn hot back here! I think all the possible new records have been set last week in Moscow. Thank god we had those new air conditioners install in the office before the heat wave, otherwise it would’ve been impossible to work. Anyways, haven’t tweeted much this week, but I did go through my RSS feeds, and here are some interesting links for web design...
How To: Retrieve a User ID via SOAP in SugarCRM
Following the Lead Generation Forms with WordPress and SugarCRM post, I came across the need to assign the generated lead to some person in the CRM. It would be easy if you could do it by simply using usernames in the system, but unfortunately usernames may change, but user IDs do not. User IDs in SugarCRM are stored in a 36-byte alphanumeric string with symbols, which is easy to capture from the...
Lead Generation Forms with WordPress and SugarCRM
It took me quite some time to get around this, but I finally managed to get it working. As you might have heard, SugarCRM has a Community Edition, which is open source and free of charge. It’s a very neat tool to play with and it’s functionality will suit most SMEs and maybe some corporations. I started playing with Sugar a few months ago, mostly with the modules functionality. Cannot...
Zend Certification: PHP 5 Mock Exam Giveaway
Last Friday I had my Zend PHP 5 Certification Exam and guess what, I passed! Yeah, so now I officially am a Zend Certified Engineer. What does this mean? Well, I had a headache studying all the PHP 5 material, especially the design & PDO chapters, which I was not too familiar with. Was it worth the time and money? Yes. I’m not sure about the certificate itself, it’s not like...
Preparing for Zend PHP 5 Certification
I mentioned on Twitter a while ago that I’ll be taking the Zend PHP 5 Certification exam at the end of this month. Well, the time has come! Exam is tomorrow noon. I’m quite excited about it, cause with this startup thing I had no time to study at all! I did read the Study Guide by php|architect and it’s quite good, but outlines only some aspects on each topic. It doesn’t...
How to Count Facebook Fans in PHP
Update: There’s an new easier way of retrieving the fans count using the Graph API, covered here: Counting Facebook Fans in PHP: The Graph API Way Not too tricky this one, but very handy as the social media world is developing extremely fast. It may not be too useful to publish the fan count of your facebook fan page if you’ve got less than a hundred or so, but as soon as you jump...
Twitter Robot in PHP: Twibots Draft
As I promised quite some time ago, I’m putting out a draft of the Twitter Robot I wrote. Make sure you read Create Your Own Automated Twitter Robot in PHP before going on. The current functionality is as follows: Tweets around the clock Tweets from RSS feeds, supporting prefix and postfix text (for adding hashtags) Retweet via the Twitter Search API and build conversation lists Shoot random...
The Twitter OAuth PHP Class Gets Even Better
Or perhaps simpler?.. Together with the Twitter API itself, the TwitterOAuth PHP class (the one by Abraham Williams) is being updated too! According to GitHub the latest changeset was commited on December 3rd so yeah, I tried to take a look at what’s going on there a few days ago and was quite disapointed. Disappointed with the fact that all my previous code was broken without giving any...
Facebook API Experiments: Twitter Tags
For quite some time now I’ve been dreaming about getting into the Facebook Platform (API, Markup Language, etc) but haven’t had good enough reasons to do so. One good friend of mine Timothy gave me those reasons not so long ago and guess what! I came up with my very first Facebook App! It’s still in the sandbox, don’t rush searching for it in the applications database...