Entries tagged “tutorial”

#design-pattern Making anchor links smarter... and sexier 14 February 2007

So I have a small bone to pick with Jacob Nielsen and his opinion on within-page links or anchor links^.1 There clearly is a benefit to not just linking to a specific page, but linking to a specific part of a page.

With a little help from script.aculo.us we can spice up our anchor links by highlighting them as well as linking to them.

For this article we’ll limit our scope to internal anchors only.² We’ll write the code using the symfony framework and in straight up XHTML. This is really dirt simple and is more of a design pattern with an example than a tutorial.

Let’s do the XHTML first:

Yup, that’s it… I told you it was dirt simple. You just need to include the proper prototype and script.aculo.us libraries.

In symfony we avoid repeating ourselves with a helper function:

and call it by doing:

That’s it.

Jacob Nielsen is an easy target. ↩
Anchors on other pages are equally useful. To implement that, you need to have an event listener to examine the URL for an anchor and appropriately highlight the correct element. ↩

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#chat Make Adium show your Facebook status 3 February 2007

By using a simple RSS feed, you can have Adium report your Facebook status.

I am a late-adopter to social networks. I participated in LiveJournal years after many of my friends started using it. I finally got into Facebook months after it was “openned up.” I like this strategy because I can immediately find my friends on the network and add them and amass 100s in a few short days.

Facebook is nice for its simple and clean interface. Even the features are fairly simple. I like the status feature… for no good reason. It’s a simple AJAX status update that updates your status on the site. What I don’t like to do is repeat myself. I wanted Adium to repeat what Facebook said.

My first inkling was to use the Facebook API, but that seemed less appealing since it would involve authentication. I almost gave up and then discovered that in Facebook you can go to “My Profile” and under “Status” go to “See All” and there’s an RSS link to your status messages. Awesome. All I needed to do is grab the first one.

I decided this looked like a task for Simple XML which can take an XML string and turn it into a PHP object.

The first step of course was to fetch the RSS feed into a string. file_get_contents made the most sense, but Facebook does a browser check even for getting RSS feeds. I’m not fond of browser sniffing, but its easy to work around if you use cURL.

Excellent… this does exactly what I want - but it’s slow. Like any good script, we should use caching if it makes sense. Obviously we don’t want to overload the servers at Facebook (or for that matter any place that serves up RSS feeds) so we implement PEAR’s Cache_Lite package. We’ll tell it to cache results for 15 minutes. The code changes are marked with //+++ at the end of each new line:

<?php

require_once('Cache/Lite.php'); //+++
	
	$url = "http://mynework.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?replace=with&your=own&feed=url";

$options = array('cacheDir' => '/tmp/', 'lifeTime' => 600); //+++

$Cache_Lite = new Cache_Lite($options); //+++

$data = null; //+++
	// attempt to load the data from cache,  //+++
	// otherwise load it anew from RSS //+++
	if (!($data = $Cache_Lite->get($id))) { //+++
	// setup curl
		$ch = curl_init();
		curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
		curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

//spoof Firefox
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061223 Firefox/2.0.0.1");

// begin output buffering
		ob_start();
		curl_exec ($ch);
		curl_close ($ch);
		// save buffer to string
		$xmlstr = ob_get_contents();

ob_end_clean();

// convert string to xml object
		$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr);

// status messages start with 'Dave is...' 
		// I just want everything after my name
		$data = str_replace('Dave ', null,$xml->channel->item->title); // +++

$Cache_Lite->save($data); //+++

} //+++

echo $data; //+++

That’s it on the PHP side. On the Adium side you’ll need to use the exec AdiumXtra. It’ll allow you to set your status to something like:

/exec {/usr/local/php5/bin/php /usr/local/bin/facebook.php}

Enjoy.

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#google Easy Yahoo! Maps and GeoRSS with symfony 26 April 2006

[rbu]: http://reviewsby.us/ [ymap]: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/index.html [gmap]: http://www.google.com/apis/maps/ [ygeo]: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html [GeoRSS]: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/georss/index.html [symfony]: http://www.symfony-project.com/ [GeoRSS][GeoRSS] is an extension of RSS that incorporates geographic data (i.e. latitude/longitude coordinates). This is useful for plotting any data that might need to be placed on a map. While building out the [reviewsby.us][rbu] map, I decided to use the [Yahoo! Maps API][ymap] versus the [Google Maps API][gmap] because I wanted to gain some familiarity with another API. It was worth trying [Yahoo!'s API][ymap]. First of all, [reviewsby.us][rbu] has addresses for restaurants and Yahoo! provides a simple [Geocoding REST][ygeo] service. This made it easy for me to convert street addresses to latitude and longitude pairs (even though this wasn't required as we'll soon see).^[1] The real selling point of [Yahoo!][ymap] was the [GeoRSS] functionality. I can extend an RSS feed (which [symfony] generates quite easily) to add latitude or longitude points (or even the street address), direct my [Yahoo! map][ymap] to the feed and voila, all the locations in that feed are now on the map, and when I click on them, the RSS item is displayed. That cut down on a lot of development time.

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