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...
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...
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...
Automated Serverside Tweeting Using OAuth
Great, our Foller.me Rundown account (@fmrd) now tweets via OAuth and has our application name and link attached to every tweet. It was indeed pretty simple. After reading the specs of the OAuth protocol I came up with a fairly simple solution. I’m using this open source Twitter OAuth php library by Abraham Williams which is quite good, and I do recommend you try some basic OAuth stuff...
Cloud Tips: Backing Up MySQL on Amazon EC2 to S3
Now that I’m all set up in the Amazon cloud I’m starting to think about backups. Elastic Block Storage (EBS) on Amazon is great and the Snapshots (backups) can be generated with a few clicks from the Management Console, but, for a few reasons I’d like to set up my own backup scripts and here’s why: Amazon EBS snapshots are cool, but there might be a situation where...
Working With Amazon EC2: Tips & Tricks
It’s been a while now since I’ve been hosting on Amazon Web Services and I’d just like to point out some issues I had and quick ways of solving them. We’re gonna talk about setting up a server that would serve not only you, but your clients too, cause $100/mo is quite expensive, isn’t it? So let’s begin and keep this as straightforward as possible. If you...
Thickbox and jQuery in WordPress 2.8
The update was great! The new features in WordPress 2.8 are awesome! Most of my Twitter friends have updated to 2.8 and haven’t had a single issue. The new widgets area is so cool! Oh jeez, I’m so excited. For a full features list check out Version 2.8 section in the Codex. Anyway, the only issue I had so far is the Thickbox usage. I’m not sure why it’s lost, but...
PHP: Thinking Ahead
Hey. Some of you might have already heard about me launching a computer graphics web 2.0 thingy here in Russia and that is basically the reason why I’m working on this series of php classes. Why didn’t I choose to run some WordPress, WordPress MU or BuddyPress? Not flexible enough. Zend Framework? Too flexible and time-consuming. You can check out the designs on my DeviantArt profile...