Terri Swallow's Weblog

Update on the Twitter Auto Post Bot’s Progress

Terri Ann — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 13:31:29 +0000

If you will allow my musing, I launched a couple killer new features to my Twitter Bot the other day that I’d like to pat myself on the back about. My Twitter Bot now retweets other Twitter accounts posts! Wow Terri, that’s revolutionary (NOT!) you say? Well here’s some other details about why I think [...]

Braided Rag Rug in Progress

Terri Ann — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 07:43:30 +0000

Yea I know, this is usually a code blog but I’m a crafter at heart and I really wanted to share some of the things I’ve learned with the online community! A month back I decided to try my hand a quilting. All went well until I had to stitch together then sandwich (the front, [...]

Automated Tweets: Rules of the Road

Terri Ann — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 21:23:34 +0000

I thought about just amending this to each of the posts in this series but I think it’s an important enough topic to cover on it’s own. Twitter has rules and even though everyone else doesn’t follow then you should. Now their listed rules of the road are subject to some interpretation but if you [...]

Extending Code Ignitor’s Loader / View Classes

Terri Ann — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:00:51 +0000

One of my Code Ignitor based projects desperately needed a iPhone view. I didn’t have many requirements but I knew I needed to find a way to do the following NOT restructure the architecture of my existing controllers or models Display the same content in a slightly different format Use the same URLs and not [...]

Auto Tweeting Random Tweets

Terri Ann — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:02:12 +0000

The first twitter bot I created for a site was an ugly critter. It consisted of ~30 pre-constructed tweets that the cronjob would randomly go through. Some messages were double posted, some were too similar and it was just terrible. I didn’t track numbers but I’m wiling to bet I lost a lot of REAL [...]

Auto Tweeting User’s Actions on Your Site (Part 1)

Terri Ann — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:03:05 +0000

Automated tweets are the worst, right? What about intelligently automated tweets with a splash of randomness, some spinning as well as name and link dropping? You with me now? Let’s take a ride through a bit of back story. Looking for Code? If you are just looking for code you are in the wrong place. [...]

cURL on Local WAMP Returns Empty! (Solved)

Terri Ann — Fri, 27 May 2011 13:58:34 +0000

Okay so let me first clarify this is not specific to WAMP server but may well be an issue there as well. XAMPP may also have this problem but I don’t know because I don’t use it. I installed each Apache, PHP and MySQL manually to my Windows 7 machine and had this problem. The [...]

CodeIgniter Using _remap() and Named Methods

Terri Ann — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 15:45:14 +0000

One of the most important methods I’ve found in CodeIgnitor is the _remap() method. When you use it within a controller it hiijacks all other methods and does your bidding. This is great when you have a controller Article.php and you want the 2nd value in your urls to be the ID number or a [...]

Duplicate or Clone a CodeIgniter Controller, by Extending it!

Terri Ann — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:35:27 +0000

I was working on a project a while back using CodeIgnitor and had a kind-of unusual case where I was developing two completely identical controllers and I needed to streamline the way I updated them. I hated adding changes line by line so I looked into using helpers, models or libraries. After some research, tearing [...]

Nice Unit aka. Nice Ads – AdSense Link Units as Tabs

Terri Ann — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 19:20:06 +0000

Spend 2 years at an ad network and you start to notice the clever ways that companies, designers and webmasters implement their ads. Here's one example that I though was particularly clever, though probably against the AdSense policy.