Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Over the last few months I've been having a lot of fun with the Twitters. It all started simply enough, just upgrading my lifestream to pull from an authenticated feed. Now I'm playing with a few Twitter bots, looking into the streaming API, and even working on a PHP library with David Kryzaniak.…
I haven't been too many conferences. DealerFire only pushed vendor conferences, fancy get-togethers in cities like Miami and Las Vegas where we all rubbed elbows with industry leaders and vied for customer attention. When I found out that Blue Door Consulting, my current place of employment, wanted…
In my last post I explained what a web crawler was and some of the basic steps that someone could break up the logic into. I also dived into some of the difficulties I had when building out my own crawler. Granted, some of the difficulties were self-imposed: I was using PHP, had a limited timeframe,…
A web crawler is a script that goes out and crawls the web. Pretty surprising, eh? There are many crawlers out there, including the famous GoogleBot that attempts to index every site it bumps into and nefarious spambots that look for and exploit vulnerabilities. The logic behind them seems simple:…
The most difficult part of pulling information from Twitter's 1.1 API is the actual request. I've covered how to create the OAuth request in some previous posts: making a basic OAuth request and passing in extra parameters. Once you get the information back, though, what do you do with it?
Twitter…
A while ago I wrote a post explaining how to pull data from Twitter's API. I focused on pulling the default authenticated user timeline (which, if you set up the application under your account, you are the authenticated user). Wouldn't it be great if you could customize the request a bit?
The…
Best practices can be great for a language like PHP. PHP is almost too easy to work in. Its low barrier of entry and high flexibility allow for many possible solutions to any given issue. Being a programmer, especially a PHP developer, you find that coming up with a fix or writing a new script is…
Twitter has been slowly changing up their API over the last few months. When I first set up a cron to pull my Twitter timeline over a year ago I was able to pull a public RSS feed without too much difficulty. If they were over capacity, either just on the API side or with the entire application, my…
PHP was the first programming language that I understood fluently. Sure, I had dabbled in BASIC, Java, ActionScript (3.0 is pretty awesome), and a few others, but PHP was the first language that I felt truly comfortable with. It wasn't until I moved onto JavaScript that I started to understand a…
One thing that all programmers and developers fear is working in someone else's code. Whether it is adding a feature or tracking down a bug, going through a foreign chunk of code can be confusing and frustrating at best. The intent of any script is best understood when it's created and quickly…