Permalinks

September 2, 2009 | Filed Under techy | Leave a Comment 

As you might have noticed, my blog is powered by ‘wordpress’. Aside from the fact that I have this office mate, aice, who have this really cute red wordpress tshirt — [I so have a crush on her tshirt btw!], I especially love wordpress and wordpress’ permalinks. Today, I was trying to copy that.. unfortunately, I got tired of tracing the wordpress code for that particular function.. so instead, I’m going to share what I have so far:

$url = preg_replace('/[^a-z 0-9]+/i','',strtolower($url));
$url = str_replace(' ','-',trim($url));

where $url is your post title. (It took me forever to get that.. so I thought someone might need it someday.. )

php’s array_search

July 9, 2009 | Filed Under techy | Leave a Comment 

Hello pipz! Yipz, I am on a small break because I just figured something out.. hehehe..

So, I was working on an “also commented on [item]” task, and came across an interesting function. If you’re wondering what “also commented on[item]” is, you can check your facebook notifications, and you can sometimes see notifications like “[friend name] also commented [post_owner]’s status”. This is a very special part of facebook that reminds you of a discussion you kind of checked out.

Read more

Google API for Image Search

July 2, 2009 | Filed Under techy | Leave a Comment 

Remember how I said that the api sometimes returns a non-existent url? (Maybe because that url can be really, really old).. The tentative solution was to add a spinning wheel as a background for that image. But today, I decided to find a better solution..

try{
      $img = @file_get_contents($r->url);
}catch(Exception $e){
      $img = '';
}
if(!$img){
      continue;   
}

This just basically means that when file_get_contents fails, do not include that image url.

Update: I found a better function, instead of file_get_contents, try using: @GetImageSize.

Google’s Autocomplete

June 24, 2009 | Filed Under techy | 1 Comment 

Google is one of the leading giants there is in the IT world. And one of the things I really like about google is google’s auto complete. It’s their own way of trying to predict what you were trying to search for. Example, you type in ‘one’.. on my search, it tried to suggest words like “one tree hill, onemorelevel, onet, one guy one cup, one life to live, one step ahead, one tree hill quotes and so on…”.

So, I’m gonna share my code on how I got google’s suggestions based on a term.. (ofcourse, this is written in PHP.. )

if($_REQUEST['q']){
$term = $_REQUEST['q']?$_REQUEST['q']:'google';
$tgNm = 'CompleteSuggestion';
$url = 'http://google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&q='
        try{
            $objDOM = new DOMDocument();
            $objDOM->load($url.$term); //make sure path is correct
            $suggestions = $objDOM->getElementsByTagName($tgNm);
            foreach( $suggestions as $s){
                $details = $s->getElementsByTagName("suggestion");
                $data = $details->item(0)->getAttribute('data');
                if($data){
                    $return[] = $data;
                }
            }
        }catch(Exception $e){
            echo $e;
        }
    }

where $_REQUEST['q'] is your magical term

Pretty simple right?

FB Gotcha #1

June 23, 2009 | Filed Under techy | 2 Comments 

Last week, I had one particular problem that was a little too hard for me. You see, I was trying to show 15 images (from google’s api) when you key in a particular word. But, I later found out that the images from google’s api are not really 100% complete.. meaning, some of them doesn’t exist anymore, which in turn will give us an empty <img> element. I don’t particularly like this because it kind of ruins the design. I really didn’t mind until my boss asked for a spinner wheel while the image is being loaded. A spinner wheel is just an image that web developers use to show that in the background, something is going on. (Something along the line of “Don’t worry, we’re trying to do something”). That can’t be too hard right? But, in Facebook’s javascript, a lot of things is hard.. like trying to figure out if the image is already loaded.. yipz, we can’t know that an image is already loaded, unless you try to check it every few seconds if an image have a height/weight.. but remember that their are browser issues when it comes to height/weight.

So, here’s what I did, I added that spinner wheel as a background for that image, added a min-height and min-width so that the spinner wheel will still show up even when the image return false. Pretty simple right? You’ve gotta love css

Just when I thought

June 12, 2009 | Filed Under techy | Leave a Comment 

I was over you. j/k ..

Just when I thought Facebook’s Batching doesn’t work for me, I looked closer and found the problem..

$api_client = $facebook->api_client;

$api_client->begin_batch();

$friends = & $api_client->friends_get();

$notifications = & $api_client->notifications_get();

$api_client->end_batch();

See, there’s this small yet tooo important ‘&’ sign. (I didn’t know without it batching won’t work :/ )

hehehhee..