OSTalks » php

How to Add a Facebook, Twitter and Google +1 Button to Your WordPress Blog

clintcan — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 05:22:12 +0000

Here’s a quickie small tip for wordpress blog users.

If you want to add your own facebook, twitter and Google +1 buttons to your blog post, simply add the following code to your functions.php of your current theme:

add_filter ('the_content', 'insertMeShare'); function insertMeShare($content) { if(is_single()) { global $post; $link = urlencode($post->guid); $content.= 'Tweet'; $content.= ''; $content.= ''; } return $content; } ?>

This code above can be modified further as a wordpress plugin so as to not modify your current theme (especially if your theme is one of those ready made themes which has an update feature). I have made mine to be a wordpress plugin and I am using this now as my current social share buttons – see the end of my post as an example of these in action. Have fun!

Putting It All Together: SpellDial php class and Android Application – Part One

clintcan — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 01:43:01 +0000

Ok, I’ve got a little time on my hand before I start with a wordpress project I am doing (creating wordpress plugins are fun – yipee ).

Let’s try to make a simple Android application using the phonegap cross-development framework calling a php script that uses my spelldial class to return a spelldial uri. Part one will describe steps on how to make your very first native webapplication in android (simply a hello world android web application).

I assume that you know how to install eclipse, the android sdk and the phonegap framework on your system (I’ll cover this in small detail, to help you get started).

There are many ways to program in android, ios, symbian, blackberry or winmo phones. There are cross-development frameworks which give you an abstract way to program in these mobile devices without dealing with the underlying phone hardware.

Two different technologies come to mind (these are the most popular that I’ve seen):
1. Appcelerator Titanium – this cross development tool allows web developers to quickly go into the mobile application department using what they know. HTML5, CSS, and a host of web programming languages such as php and ruby are supported. What is unique about this SDK is that these technologies are then compiled into their native counterparts – the end result is a native application. Impressive, actually. Supports both iOS and Android environments.
2. Phonegap takes a different approach. This is closest to what you call as a web application encapsulated in the mobile phone’s browser class. For example, what this means, in Android, this framework wraps around the WebView Java class and makes certain native phone functionalities available (like accessing your contacts for example) through javascript. For flash/flex developers, this is much like the ExternalInterface class that bridges between javascript and the flash application.

Which is more appropriate? If you’re a web developer and would like to make your application as close as possible to a native application, your best bet would be Appcelerator.

Why am I using phonegap in this case? If you just like to quickly develop applications and do not care if they look different from native applications, use phonegap. By the way, because of how phonegap works, it is available to more mobile environments than Appcelerator. Symbian, WinMo, Blackberry, iOS and Android mobile environments are supported by phonegap. No matter what the environment, your application would look the same because it is just practically your html application enclosed in the native phone’s browser class.

Also, phonegap is supported by the Dreamweaver CS 5.5 release, which means if you can afford it, mobile development will be quite simple to do (without using Eclipse as your environment to develop phonegap applications).

Now, lets begin. Let’s create a new project in eclipse by selecting File->New->Other

We now include our details for the application (Since Froyo or Eclair, the android version before 2.2, runs in 86% of android phones, I choose the lowest common denominator, Eclair), below:

We will have to add the phonegap jar file to the libs folder (which you will have to create) and also create the /assets/www folder where you will place the html files for your application. In this www folder, you will have also to place the phonegap.js file in there. This js file contains the functions that you will call to access native mobile phone functions such as accessing your camera, contacts, etc.

In order for Eclipse not to spurt out an error message (having a java class not available for use), we have to add phonegap.jar to the Build Path (Right click on the libs folder, select Build Path->Configure Build Path):

We will now edit the spelldial.java source code which was created using the New Project Wizard to look like this:

Let’s look at it line by line:

import ... import com.phonegap.*;

The code above imports the phonegap class for use in our application.

public class spelldial extends DroidGap

Our spelldial class (which was created by the Wizard), extends upon the DroidGap class, which is in fact an extension of the WebView class.

This line below is what runs the web application (sort of like the main() function in your c program):

super.loadUrl("file://android_asset/www/index.html");

You can change the url to whatever you have placed in the assets/www folder as your starting point. index.html can simply be text saying “hello world” at this point.

One more thing, since phonegap uses certain native phone functions which require explicit permissions for the app to run, we’ll have to edit our AndroidManifest.xml to allow our app to use these:

These tags are placed below the android:versionName section:

android:largeScreens="true" android:normalScreens="true" android:smallScreens="true" android:resizeable="true" android:anyDensity="true" />

And there you have it, some basic steps on how to set up the phonegap framework in eclipse. Part 2 will be the actual js code and php code that this web application uses to call a person using the spelldial api php class hosted on a server.

To end this, let’s take a look at phonegap support in Dreamweaver CS 5.5:

Spelldial Class

clintcan — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 01:11:48 +0000

Hi guys,

Another short post. I went to a small group hosted by techtalks (my former boss was one of the co-organizers) in IT Park. I met a lot of interesting people there, and there were quite a number of foreigners too (having their startups, some in the process of making a startup, etc)!

In short, this was a great experience because I for one dream to make a startup of my own too (poor programmer, no funds to do it – but the stuff I found there was educational to say the least).

Anyways, I saw a team of young guys (from the looks of it, new graduates, or even maybe in college), who have a startup company named Spelldial. Well, I maybe an old fart, but I when I see enthusiasm, especially from youth, of course, as heck, I get impressed.

What is SpellDial? From their website, it says:

SpellDial is a technology that allows you to dial names instead of numbers. This is applicable only for those who have setup a spelldial account. Once you have checked the availability of your username you can register it to point to a specific number. So instead of dialing a number, you dial their username.

They have a webapp that you can point your android or iphone to, but nevertheless, when you point that url to your desktop browser, it doesn’t work (obvious reasons).

I then took a quick peek at their api, and made a php wrapper class for it in about an hour (so that you won’t need to think about the details of calling the api). It’s as simple as doing these lines of code:

include "spelldial.php"; $spell = new Spelldial(); $result = $spell->get_info("us.example"); print_r($result); ?>

I know, the api yet is apparently in their very early stages (some of their api functions return nothing), but considering they are all young guys, it’s a great start for them

Get my spelldial class here. I might in the future make an actionscript class (for flash users) and maybe even a java class for this one, but no promises.

Here’s the spelldial class in action (it’s a quick hack, so I’m sorry it’s ugly)

A Possible Quick Fix to the Inconsistent “Invalid OAuth 2.0 Access Token” errors (facebook bug 15933)

clintcan — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 11:43:11 +0000

A few weeks ago, our recently converted FBML application to iFrame application (done last January), suddenly experienced endless redirection loops.

2 days into the problem and frantically searching for a possible solution, I found others experiencing the issue which is currently the most popular opened bug in facebook.

Since I’m using php for the sdk, I followed the advice in comment #119 by a certain Bret Stubbs, using the latest php sdk (although I use a particularly new sdk, a version before the latest) and changing this code:

// try loading session from signed_request in $_REQUEST $signedRequest = $this->getSignedRequest(); if ($signedRequest) { // sig is good, use the signedRequest $session = $this->createSessionFromSignedRequest($signedRequest); }

to this code here:

// try loading session from signed_request in $_REQUEST $signedRequest = $this->getSignedRequest(); if ($signedRequest) { if (!isset($signedRequest['user_id'])) { return null; } // sig is good, use the signedRequest $session = $this->createSessionFromSignedRequest($signedRequest); }

And found out this didn’t work for me at first (looping redirects still occured). I found out that enabling the first option below fixed the looping problem:

This would fix most of the problems with the looping redirects that I encountered. There was other sections that still had the looping redirect problems and this was solved by removing all instances of the “session” parameter checks that facebook would add to the end of the url after authorization. What I’m finding odd though is that facebook even though I specifically enabled that deprecated option “Canvas Session Parameter”, facebook doesn’t already return this parameter (I would consider this already obsoleted).

Is this the end of the story for this bug? Not by a long shot. There are still errors when calling certain OLD REST APIs through the new SDK and calling the FQL API function (still not resolved yet). I have already migrated code to avoid these calls as much as possible(I use direct graph api calls in the new codebase as much as possible, and js SDK functions for certain functions that are in the new Graph API SDK but are inferior to the OLD REST APIs in customizability… and there are no more fql function calls in the codebase).

What do I think of all of these? Robert Turall, a UK based facebook developer sums it up nicely in his blog:

The problem with Facebook’s approach to their platform and to App developers is that we all have to work to a moving target, an inherently unstable platform. Such a platform is not really suitable for producing the kind of campaign-based Apps that I produce but Facebook market their platform as THE socially-aware marketing platform for campaign-based Apps.

It’s about time they started to run it like one – got some decent QA in place and thoroughly tested their releases before throwing bug-ridden code out into the World.

I agree with this completely. Facebook APIs have been moving in such a manner that it is difficult for a developer track all the changes by himself. Incomplete documentation especially with recommended new ways of doing facebook development, the defeaning silence of Facebook staff with regards to some bugs (for example I have been keeping track of a certain bug which is already almost a year open, which is important to an app which I’ve developed, until I’ve decided to do a workaround which results to a more clunky experience due to deadline constraints), all adds to tensions in the facebook developer community.

Dream Big – An Open Source Tale

clintcan — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:24:04 +0000

Don’t ever let yourself be put down because other people say it can’t be done.

This is a simple story of how leveraging open source technologies can bring you to heights and depths you thought you could never reach.

Around 2002, November, I was asked by one of our ministry head to think of a way to make a new website geared for students. When I think of now, it was really like a social network on a much much smaller scale.

The situation here on the student network’s proposed site was this: they had already searched for a software development firm in Manila and asked for a quotation and timeframe of the work. They said it would take 3 months, and about a six digit amount to get it done. Since that was way too much, they decided to look into the outreach here in Cebu and ask around if there were any people somehow knowledgeable enough to take the challenge.

A few months before, where I was working, I had started studying and implementing some LAMP architecture on the corporate website. Mind you, my skills then were not so mature yet. PHP was still version 4.x and there were even some 3.x versions around. You can even call me a greenhorn (newbie) during this time – on the company I was in, all I had was Dreamweaver 4 to work upon the website, and some tutorials from the web on how to set up and program in php.

To make the long story short, I and two other people from the community (serving in ministry work), were tasked to do what one would have thought to be impossible to do during that time – make the student network site, complete with interactive forums and one login registrations to be part of the site, and with ALL content in less than one month. Yes, that’s right, the site was going to be launched a little bit after Christmas.

Since I was working then, we had to take turns in programming and developing the site. I was the head then of the 3 person team in Cebu. The two were not working yet, so I tasked them to make the different sections of the site. We were working at my home (no problems, I was single then ). Some people from our main branch in Manila were sending designs for us to cut and slice and place in the site.

After of almost a month of non-stop work on the site. It was done, and uploaded to a shared server through dialup (it would take 3-4 hours to update the whole site).

What’s the lesson of this experience? If I were to use proprietary software and languages it would be a whole lot more expensive (I knew there was asp, and coldfusion, but hosting for that was expensive). We had to use the one available on most cheap servers at that time, and that was a LAMP based server. We leveraged free forum software and modified it and integrated it into the site’s one login and registration. If we had started from scratch we wouldn’t have had finished the site on time. Open Source is all about collaboration, and this experience has taught me a lot about coordinating remotely too.

Looking back, I was to lead the original web team here for about 2 more years, before moving on (by then they had grown to more than 5) – after which, I was still assigned to the original website which we made, and helped worked on two more sites and administered the ministry’s server (which was now a dedicated server). The site which we first started won the Catholic Mass Media Awards for Best Website for 3 straight years before becoming a Hall of Fame Awardee. I was incidentally there using a borrowed suit during the first time we won (it was held in Ateneo and televised nationwide, hosted by some guy and Donita Rose), and that by itself was an experience I’ll never forget. You can get the list of winners during the first time the site won at the cmma foundation website here.

Dream Big. It can be done.

Facebook: Hiphop for PHP Released As Open Source

clintcan — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:06:07 +0000

After spending some weeks in rumor land, Facebook has now released a cross-compiling language converter for PHP as open source (php license), titled Hiphop for PHP.

What the application does is to programatically convert PHP source code into C++ and compile it with g++.

According to senior engineer Haiping Zhao, Hiphop has now been deployed to 90% of the Facebook traffic, six months after deployment.

For more information, please see the video below:

Import DBF Files To MySQL Using PHP

clintcan — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:35:35 +0000

I recently had a task to do for a friend of mine to migrate Visual FoxPro data into a mysql database.

As a programmer that doesn’t like to re-invent the wheel, I tried searching through google, but was only partially successful in getting code to insert dbf data into mysql (it was public domain code, but only had code to insert data into a table that was created earlier).

This is the code modified to work with any dbf file – it creates the table, then inserts the dbf data into the created table. The code was further modified to strip whitespaces from the text values (FoxPro/DBase pads text with spaces up to the length of the field). You may want to change this further, since this is a quick and dirty code for the sole purpose of importing dbf tables. This works with my rpms at the repository.

/* * Part 2 code modified by Clint Christopher Canada from different public domain sources * Part 1 code created by Clint Christopher Canada. BSD licensed. */


// This is Part I of the code

$tbl = "table to create";

$db_uname = 'mysql username';

$db_passwd = 'mysql password';

$db = 'database';

$conn = mysql_pconnect('localhost',$db_uname, $db_passwd); 
// Path to dbase file

$db_path = ".DBF";
// Open dbase file

$dbh = dbase_open($db_path, 0)

  or die("Error! Could not open dbase database file '$db_path'.");
// Get column information

$column_info = dbase_get_header_info($dbh);
// Display information

//print_r($column_info);
$line = array();
foreach($column_info as $col)

{

	switch($col['type'])

	{

		case 'character':

			$line[]= "`$col[name]` VARCHAR( $col[length] )";

			break;

		case 'number':

			$line[]= "`$col[name]` FLOAT";

			break;

		case 'boolean':

			$line[]= "`$col[name]` BOOL";

			break;

		case 'date':

			$line[]= "`$col[name]` DATE";

			break;

		case 'memo':

			$line[]= "`$col[name]` TEXT";

			break;

	}

}

$str = implode(",",$line);

$sql = "CREATE TABLE `$tbl` ( $str );";
mysql_select_db($db,$conn);
mysql_query($sql,$conn);

set_time_limit(0); // I added unlimited time limit here, because the records I imported were in the hundreds of thousands.
// This is part 2 of the code
import_dbf($db, $tbl, $db_path);
function import_dbf($db, $table, $dbf_file)

{

    global $conn;

    if (!$dbf = dbase_open ($dbf_file, 0)){ die("Could not open $dbf_file for import."); }

    $num_rec = dbase_numrecords($dbf);

    $num_fields = dbase_numfields($dbf);

    $fields = array();
    for ($i=1; $i<=$num_rec; $i++){

        $row = @dbase_get_record_with_names($dbf,$i);

        $q = "insert into $db.$table values (";

        foreach ($row as $key => $val){

            if ($key == 'deleted'){ continue; }

            $q .= "'" . addslashes(trim($val)) . "',"; // Code modified to trim out whitespaces

        }

        if (isset($extra_col_val)){ $q .= "'$extra_col_val',"; }

        $q = substr($q, 0, -1);

        $q .= ')';

        //if the query failed - go ahead and print a bunch of debug info

        if (!$result = mysql_query($q, $conn)){

            print (mysql_error() . " SQL: $q
\n");

            print (substr_count($q, ',') + 1) . " Fields total.
";

            $problem_q = explode(',', $q);

            $q1 = "desc $db.$table";

            $result1 = mysql_query($q1, $conn);

            $columns = array();

            $i = 1;

            while ($row1 = mysql_fetch_assoc($result1)){

                $columns[$i] = $row1['Field'];

                $i++;

            }

            $i = 1;

            foreach ($problem_q as $pq){

                print "$i column: {$columns[$i]} data: $pq
\n";

                $i++;

            }

            die();

        }

    }

}

?>

Starting a Facebook Application

clintcan — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:36:15 +0000

One of the most popular social networking sites today is facebook. As of this time, the social networking site boasts of over 300 million users, which is pretty hard to ignore, considering marketing value.

What makes facebook interesting are its applications; which are mostly user created, and add life to the social networking site.

Here’s how to submit a facebook application to the net:

1. Join as a facebook developer, and on the http://www.facebook.com/developers/ url, click on the Set up new application button

2. On the Create App page, type in the name of your application

3. Take note of the API Key and Secret; you’ll need these later. Fill up the necessary items in the Basic Page.

4. Enter the canvas url (where your application will reside in apps.facebook.com), and the content url where your application is hosted.

5. Press Save, and you’re off to start a brave new world of creating a Facebook Application!

The simplest start for a facebook application looks like this:

require_once 'php/facebook.php'; require_once 'config.php';

$facebook = new Facebook($api_key, $secret);
$user_id = $facebook->require_login();

echo “Hello, $user_id!”;

facebook.php is the facebook php client which you can download in the developers site. You can learn more about the api in the http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/ site.

Have fun!

Mypodcast.com Feeds and Longtailvideo Media Player

clintcan — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 07:51:38 +0000

The religious community that I’m in delves into media. In fact we have a website that showcases video and audio materials for free.

We use the ever popular video/media flash player made by Longtail Video to stream our mp3 and video files to be distributed and seen by people in the web.

As we host our mp3 files in mypodcast.com, the rss feed that is delivered my the site isn’t exactly compatible with the player – so I had to parse the rss feed and re encode it into an rss feed that the longtail player recognizes.

In order to not reinvent the wheel in reading rss feeds, I used the ever popular open source (BSD-licensed) php feed reader, simplepie.

Below this page is the quick and dirty code that I used. I hope this will help you get started in the world of podcasting!

require_once('simplepie.inc');

$feed = new SimplePie(‘http://host/rss.xml’);
set_cache_location($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . ‘/cache/’);

$feed->handle_content_type();

rss feed name
get_items() as $item)
{
$title = $item->get_title();
$date = $item->get_date();
if ($enclosure = $item->get_enclosure())
{
$media = $enclosure->get_link();
$length = $enclosure->get_duration(true);
}
$subtitle = $item->subtitle;
$description = $item->get_description();
//print_r($enclosure);
$desc = explode(“”,”",$image);
echo ”

$title
$author

“;
}
?>

Heywatch and php

clintcan — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:20:23 +0000

Heywatch is a cool video encoding web service that is being used by different clients like Sony, Fotolia, Kickapps, MTv, among others for their video conversion needs.

One nice thing about this service is that it has a REST based API that is simple to implement in php. However, the documentation that comes with heywatch shows only how to access the API using PEAR – this becomes a disadvantage if your shared hosted webhost doesn’t have PEAR installed. I also personally think that using PEAR just to call this api is basically overkill.

Why not use curl instead? I basically changed the PEAR functions in the API documentation to that of php curl functions (which are basically native and available in practically all shared php webhosting)

$video_url = "http://osaddict.com/files/elephantsdream-480-h264-st-aac.mov"; $format_id = "1086"; // 1086 for flash h264, 31 for flash flv $ftp = "ftp://username:password@ftphost.com"; $ping_after_encode = "http://host/heywatch/success.php?myvideoid=5&myuserid=1"; $ping_if_error = "http://host/heywatch/error.php"; $ch = curl_init(); $your_username = ""; $your_password = ""; $arr = array($video_url,"format_id"=>$format_id,"automatic_encode"=>"true","ftp_directive"=>$ftp,"title"=>"My Video Title","keep_video_size"=>"true"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $your_username.':'.$your_password); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$arr);

$data = curl_exec($ch);

if (curl_errno($ch)) {
print curl_error($ch);
exit;
} else {
curl_close($ch);
}

header(“Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8″);
header(“Pragma: no-cache”);
echo $data;
?>

What this code does is to download a video, convert it to h264 flash format, then upload it to a select ftp host in just one step (success.php and error.php are ping functions where the developer is notified if conversion was successful or not).

One thing to take note is that heywatch doesn’t like special characters in the ftp url, if you place such characters in the $ftp variable, heywatch upload fails.

Have fun!