How I built icant.co.uk – source code

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 3:24 pm

After my talk at FOWA in Cambridge yesterday I showed off that http://icant.co.uk is fully driven by YUI and YQL and maintained elsewhere. I’ve recorded a screencast about this earlier which is also available for download as a M4V but hadn’t released the code yet.

So here goes – this is the PHP source of icant.co.uk (without the HTML which is more or less done with YUI grids builder


// get all the feeds to grab the data
$feeds = array(
'http://feeds2.feedburner.com/wait-till-i/gwZf',
'http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/codepo8/myvideos?count=15',
'http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/codepo8/sandbox',
'http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/codepo8/icantarticles',
'http://www.slideshare.net/rss/user/cheilmann'
);

// assemble the YQL statement
$yql = 'select meta.views,content.thumbnail,content.description,title,'.
'link,description from rss where url in ';
$yql .= "('" . join($feeds,"','") . "')";

// assemble the request url
$root = 'http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=';
$url = $root . urlencode($yql) . '&format=json';

// get the feeds and populate the data to echo out in the HTML
$feeds = renderFeeds($url);
$blog = $feeds['blog'];
$videos = $feeds['videos'];
$articles = $feeds['articles'];
$presentations = $feeds['slides'];

// this function loads all the feeds and turns them into HTML
function renderFeeds($url){

// grab the content from YQL via cURL
$c = getStuff($url);

// as the content comes back as JSON, turn it into PHP objects
$x = json_decode($c);

// reset counter for videos and presentations
$count = 0;
$vidcount = 0;

// start new array to return
$out = array();

// loop over YQL results, if they exist.
if($x->query->results->item){
foreach($x->query->results->item as $i){

// if the link comes from the blog, add to the blog HTML
if(strstr($i->link,'wait-till-i')){
$out['blog'] .= '' . $i->title .
'';
}

// if the description contains an embed code, add to videos
// (I use delicious for video bookmarks and add the embed code
// as a description, check here:
//         http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/codepo8/myvideos)
if(strstr($i->description,'link . '">' . $i->title .
'' . html_entity_decode($i->description) .
'';
$vidcount++;
}
// for interviews and articles, add to the articles section
if(strstr($i->title,'Interview') ||
strstr($i->title,'Article:')){
$out['articles'].= '' .$i->title .
'
'.html_entity_decode($i->description).
'';
}

// for slideshare, add to slides element.
if(strstr($i->link,'slideshare') && $count < 4){
$out['slides'] .= '' . $i->title .
'
' . $i->content->description->content .
'';
$count++;
}
}
}
// return back the array :)
return $out;
}

// Grab the conference agenda from my blog
$yql = 'select * from html where url='.
'"http://wait-till-i.com/talks-and-conference-participation/"'.
' and xpath="//ul" limit 1';
$travels = renderHTML($root.urlencode($yql).'&format=xml&diagnostics=false');
// btw, diagnostics=false means YQL doesn't send a diagnostics part

// grab the books from my blog
$yql = 'select * from html where url='.
'"http://wait-till-i.com/books/"'.
' and xpath="//div[@class='entry']"';
$books = renderHTML($root.urlencode($yql).'&format=xml&diagnostics=false');

// this is a quick and dirty solution for the HTML output
function renderHTML($url){
// pull the information from YQL
$c = getStuff($url);
// check that something came back
if(strstr($c,'<')){
// remove all the XML parts
$c = preg_replace("/.*|.*/",'',$c);
$c = preg_replace("//",'',$c);
// remove all comments
$c = preg_replace("//",'',$c);
}
// send it back
return $c;
}

// a simple cURL function to get information
function getstuff($url){
$curl_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);
if (empty($buffer)){
return 'Error retrieving data, please try later.';
} else {
return $buffer;
}
}