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{ Category Archives } PHP

A Search Box for the Website

I've been playing with search engines and for the search API I'm going with Bing; Google limits their free API to 100 queries a day and requires creating a custom search engine. Bing requires signing up and getting an "AppID" but from there it's unlimited. Documentation is, well, Microsoftian: impossible to find and hard to [...]
2011 02 25 Danny Comments (2)

Sitemeter Stats for non-HTML pages

Sitemeter works by inserting an image and iframe into your page, so that when the browser retrieves it, sitemeter can look at the referer and know what page was visited. But you can't include image links in an XML or GIF file, so I can't tell which of the bililite webservices are being visited. But [...]
2010 12 26 Danny Web Design Comments (0)

Simple Sitemeter Widget

I just started using Sitemeter for tracking page visits (everyone seems to use Google Analytics, but I've used Sitemeter before and am satisfied with what I've got). Sort of depressing seeing a "1" for the visit count, but it's new as of today. Creating a widget to put in the sidebar was straightforward, since I've [...]
2010 12 26 Danny Web Design Comments (0)

Hacking My Way to an Amazon Wishlist Widget

Since AVH Amazon plugin no longer works, as Amazon in its infinite wisdom removed the ListLookup API call, I had to create my own. Without an API, I resorted to a hacker's best friend: screen scraping. The wishlist page has a simple structure, and all links to Amazon products have as part of the URL [...]
2010 10 31 Danny Comments (11)

AVH Amazon Plugin, RIP

I've been using Peter van der Does's AVH Amazon plugin to display my Amazon wish list (more as an "about my interests" than a "buy things and make me money") and it's worked well, allowing a random selection of books I would like to be shown in the sidebar. Now it's dead, killed by Amazon's [...]
2010 10 31 Danny Web Design Comments (0)

Parsing the HTTP Accept: header

I wanted the webservices to be as RESTful as possible, so they should use the Accept: header rather than file name extensions to determine the type.
2010 01 06 Danny Comments (1)

bililite.com webservices

I've been spending my project time learning how to manipulate images in PHP to let me create custom growth charts and the like, with a RESTful interface that would allow them to be used as the source of <img> elements. I like the way things turned out; they are available at bililite.com/webservices/. It includes height,weight, [...]
2009 12 31 Danny Medical Informatics Comments (0)

Moving the Blog

I decided that this blog is mine, rather than Young Israel's, so I wanted to move it to a domain that I personally own. Thus, it is no longer at youngisrael-stl.org/wordpress, but at bililite.com/blog. Moving the blog intact was non-trivial, so I'm recording how I did it, based on mydigitallife's instructions: Create the new folder, [...]
2009 06 05 Danny Web Design Comments (0)

Scheduling tasks with PHP

I've got a cheap website that doesn't let me use cron to schedule tasks (like database backups), so I had to do it myself. I found pseudo-cron, which looks cool but has some bugs and was more complicated than I wanted, so I wrote a simple PHP script to do what I wanted.
2009 02 12 Danny Comments (0)

The Agony of Unicode (and backing up mySQL)

All I wanted to do was back up the Young Israel databases, some way more amenable to automation than phpMyAdmin. There are lots of PHP-based solutions on the web, but all seem based on mysqldump. I implemented one and found myself faced with an eyeful of אריאל מאיר יעקב בן דוד אברהם where the Hebrew [...]
2009 02 10 Danny Web Design Comments (1)