PhpCookies

Crunch crunch

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:39:42 EST

Hello all!

How are you doing? Still crunching on those nice cookies? Maybe. Well, I'm back to tell some things, and see if there is still an audience willing to listen to my PHP ramblings. First, let me tell you my "personal situation". Wow, that's sound like it's all horrible. It's not.

During the last period of time, I have been working on starting up a company. Also, at school, the pressure was way higher than expected. Much tests, that eventually count for my exam sometimes, and sometimes regular tests. And much much homework. As you might understand, it's not easy to sleep then, nor is it easy to pay much time to writing for this blog.

Solution?
The solution is, slowing down a bit. I've been realizing that I paid too much time starting up the company with the guy I did. It went smooth (most of the time), and it was much fun, and this is a very nice opportunity. But not for a 15 year old boy at the other end of the world (it was in America), who's still attending school at the busiest period of it. So, solution is to quit building up the company, getting clients. Chapter closed.

... and that means?
That I can get high marks for all my tests, paying more attention to school. Also, this means I free up time to sleep (yes!) and it allows me to start writing on PhpCookies again! In the beginning, I will take it easy, and probably after 2 weeks from now, I really start posting, because next week I'm away for holidays.

So I want to know, is there still an audience for this blog? Or is it wasted time?

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Merry Christmas Everybody!

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 15:01:23 EST

You might have figured out, that I have been very very busy lately. School was one big disaster. So many tests these days, before christmas holiday. But, now finally I have christmas holiday, and I'm enjoying it. I hope to have more time soon to write some cool PHP posts, so get ready to read.

For now, I want to wish you all a Happy Christmas and a great coding 2008.

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Affiliate PHP Coding Blog

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:29:46 EST

My guess is many of the php coders reading this blog also dabble in the fine arts of affiliate marketing so I wanted to share a blog with you that I got an email "tip" about from someone nicknamed "mutt".

With a tagline like this "Helping you put more money in your pocket faster through PHP coding" you might want to check it out: Affiliate, SEO and PHP Coding Blog - OOOFF.com

A couple interesting tutorials just from a quick browse of the front page:

Easy PHP Proxy Checker Tutorial

How to Track Converting Keywords for your Affiliate Marketing advertising using PHP

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Fantastic videos ...

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:26:37 EST

Hey all ... I stumbled upon (no, not through stumbleupon.com ...) some videos where Googlers are talking. To be more specific, on one Douglas Merrill (VP of Engineering, and a GREAT guy... I want his e-mail address!), and on the other Larry Page and Sergey Brin (I want their e-mail addresses too. Especially Sergey. He is such a genius. You too, Larry).

So... in one of these videos, Douglas Merrill is at a university in Prague. He talks about the problems you face when building a search engine. He is a great, and interactive, speaker.

And, in the other, (which is significantly shorter ...) the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are talking about Google, about some traffic stuff, and you know ... not much. But it's a great talk anyway ;)

Yep, this isn't pure PHP. But it's related to search engines. AND I'M SEARCH ENGINE MINDED!

What do you think? Did you enjoy the videos, or are you not even going to look at them?

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What PHP Editor Do You use?

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:58:35 EST

A php editor is a program that you edit php with. What is the best php editor?

Currently I use htmlkit which isn't designed specifically for php and lacks a bunch.

Things at the top of my required list for my php editor:

Intellisense - I wish it would guess what i'm trying to type and tell me the options avaialable pluse the syntax. For instance if i typed in the first few letters of explode() it would tell me the syntax.

Indenting - I would love my editor to indent my php code properly.

Color coding - i wish my editor would have different colors for variables, loops, etc.

What php editor do you use or recommend?

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IF-Statements... Your Ever Lasting Problem Explained

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 07:06:49 EST

I was talking with someone on MSN, who explained me that she had problems with if-statements. That it was like learning maths. I don't have much problems with it, but others may have.

So today, let's talk about the basics of if-statements.

What IS it?
They are the possibility to check variables (that's just one thing) against another variable. Or value against variable (or otherwise).

An example can be a simple dice. I first use the rand() function to produce a random number between 1 and 6. Then, if the dice returns 5, I output something. Basically, this is the #5 Dice game (doesn't exists, I hope?). When the dice returns 5, the player wins, else the player loses.

$dice = rand(1,6);
if($dice == 5)
{
echo "You won!";
}else{
echo "You loose!";
}
?>

Fairly simple... right? Note that if you use $dice = 5, you actually assign the number 5 to the variable $dice, which will usually always return to true, meaning that it looks like the dice always returns 5 in this case!

What's more?
What if you have the same dice, but now if the dice is 4,5,6 (basically, any number higher than 3), the player wins, else looses. This can be done in two different ways. Either check whether the number is higher than 3, or whether the number is 4 or higher. When doing higher than 3:

if($dice > 3)

When doing 4 or higher:

if($dice >= 4)

This isn't acracadabra, right!?
Let's move on! The type comparing operator, === and !==. This will check if the types of the two values match, in addition to the value. For example:

if((int) 5 == "5")
{
echo "Exactly the same!";
}
if((int) 5 === "5")
{
echo "Exactly the same!";
}
?>

You would guess that 5 is still 5 right? But the second if-statements says, hey, the first one is an integer, the other one is a string!

Now, on to the next example: the dice must NOT return 5, or the player will loose.

if($dice != 5)
{
echo "You won!";
}

And another example, the dice must be either 1 or 6, in order for the player to win.

if($dice == 1 || $dice == 6)
{
echo "You won";
}

As you can see, || means OR. If you want to do AND, you do &&. With the OR statements, both sides of the || can be true, with the AND statement, both must be. We also have the exclusive or, or XOR. Then either one must be true, but NOT both. For example, we have two dices. One of them must be the number 1, but NOT BOTH!

$dice_one = rand(1,6);
$dice_two = rand(1,6);
if($dice_one == 1 ^ $dice_two == 1)
{
echo "You won!";
}
?>

I think that's enough brain-cracking for today.

Good luck using this ;)

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Some common PHP mistakes.

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:56:32 EST

I just wanted to quickly share with you this link I've found over at the devzone from Zend. It's an article about "PHP Gotcha's".

Link to the article

There are some common glitches, and mistakes made by programmers (also, make sure to checkout the comments section!)

Do you have any to add?

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Amazon Example Query Using The Amazon Rest API To Return Amazon Products

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 20:58:29 EST

The following code example will show you how to query the amazon.com database and return products you requested with your affiliate code, some pictures, and editorial reviews. When finished you should be able to make a basic amazon request and return the unformatted result in a php page.

For an overview of what a REST api is see the video Rest Api In Plain English.

Set Some Basic Variables

You need to provide your amazon developer key, associate tag, some keywords, and a search index to make a query. We do that with our first block of code:

//change these variables to yours
$amazonid = ""; //your developer key
$amazontag="45n5-20";//your associates Id to get paid
$keywords="make money";//your keywords to search
$safequery=urlencode($keywords); //make the keywords url friendly
$searchindex="Blended"; //change to the index you want to search

Create The Url To Request The Info From Amazon

When using amazon's rest api you provide them with a URL request and they will return an answer. Here is the url construction with our variables in the url:

////now build the url like amazon wants it
$whaturl="http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService";
$whaturl.="&IdType=ASIN&ResponseGroup=Large&SearchIndex=" . $searchindex;
$whaturl.="&Operation=ItemSearch&Keywords=" . $safequery;
$whaturl.="&AWSAccessKeyId=" . $amazonid;
$whaturl.="&AssociateTag=" . $amazontag . "&Version=2007-05-14";

Connect To Amazon And Get The Result

We use CURL to connect to amazon and return their xml answer in a variable with the following code:

//let's connect to the amazon url with curl and grab the response
//we'll store the response in the $data variable
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Convert the Amazon Response to XML that PHP can understand

PHP5 has simplexml that really makes working with XML very easy. Simply load a text variable with xml data into an xml element and you can traverse the nodes all day long.

note: to see the notes available uncomment the $whaturl variable and copy and paste that into the browser to see the raw result amazon returns

Here's the code to load the amazon response into XML that PHP can understand:

//now we will create a php element out of the data so
//we can then loop through and grab our results
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);

Finally we want to loop through the XML data and print out the data we want to display to users. See the previous step's note on how to see all of the nodes returned by amazon. See this link on how to traverse xml nodes with php.

//now we loop through the xml document to grab what we want
if ($xml->Items->Item) {
$x=0;
foreach ($xml->Items->Item as $item) {
echo "ASIN . "/$amazontag\">SmallImage->URL . "\" style=\"margin-right:10px;\" align=\"left\" alt=\"\" />";
echo "" . $item->ItemAttributes->Title . "

";
echo "ASIN . "/$amazontag\">View This Product at Amazon

";
echo $item->EditorialReviews->EditorialReview->Content . "

";
echo "
";
}}

All together now

Here is the code all put together now:

//change these variables to yours
$amazonid = ""; //your developer key
$amazontag="45n5-20";//your associates Id to get paid
$keywords="make money";//your keywords to search
$safequery=urlencode($keywords); //make the keywords url friendly
$searchindex="Blended"; //change to the index you want to search

////now build the url like amazon wants it
$whaturl="http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService";
$whaturl.="&IdType=ASIN&ResponseGroup=Large&SearchIndex=" . $searchindex;
$whaturl.="&Operation=ItemSearch&Keywords=" . $safequery;
$whaturl.="&AWSAccessKeyId=" . $amazonid;
$whaturl.="&AssociateTag=" . $amazontag . "&Version=2007-05-14";

//uncomment the next line to view the xml returned
//echo $whaturl . "
";

//let's connect to the amazon url with curl and grab the response
//we'll store the response in the $data variable
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

//now we will create a php element out of the data so
//we can then loop through and grab our results
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);

//now we loop through the xml document to grab what we want
if ($xml->Items->Item) {
$x=0;
foreach ($xml->Items->Item as $item) {
echo "ASIN . "/$amazontag\">SmallImage->URL . "\" style=\"margin-right:10px;\" align=\"left\" alt=\"\" />";
echo "" . $item->ItemAttributes->Title . "

";
echo "ASIN . "/$amazontag\">View This Product at Amazon

";
echo $item->EditorialReviews->EditorialReview->Content . "

";
echo "
";
}}

?>

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SimplePie. The best pie you will ever get!

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 12:32:30 EST

So, I was wondering what Mark used for grabbing RSS articles. I used the MagPieRSS script, but Mark recommended me SimplePie. This truelly is the best pie you will ever get. Honestly. At least, it helped to make my life one or two steps easier, in addition to MagPieRSS.

Let me explain
MagPieRSS will grab the feed, and then process it, and return a big object with all the rss feed items, and tags and whatever in it. You then go through all of these items, and find out what you have to use in order to display the content for example. (Some feeds use others use others use ... well, you know what I mean). And that is what made it so stupid. Having multiple if statements and whatever, just to check out what the content tag was, what the date tag was.

SimplePie is different. It includes the most popular tags, and automatically detects which one to use for the feed. You simple use a function from a class, and voila, you have the content, date and title, all in one place.

Auto-discovery
Also, SimplePie has some basic auto-feed discovery built-in. You just say phpcookies.com, and it will go and look for the feed on that particular site.

So once again, SimplePie ROCKS!

Thanks Mark :)

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Rest Api In Plain English

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:53:04 EST

Before I give any code samples here for using api's I thought I'd try to explain in plain english what exactly an API is.

For more info:

PHP And XML. They Are Friends!

PHP, CURL, and YOU!

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