Christian Heilmann

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’] .= ‘

  • 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’].= ‘

  • link . ‘”>’ . $i->title .

    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);
    $c = preg_replace(“/ ” encoding=”UTF-8”?>/”,’‘,$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;
    }

    }

  • Tags: , , , , ,

    Share on Mastodon (needs instance)

    Share on Twitter

    Newsletter

    Check out the Dev Digest Newsletter I write every week for WeAreDevelopers. Latest issues:

    160: Graphs and RAGs explained and VS Code extension hacks Graphs and RAG explained, how AI is reshaping UI and work, how to efficiently use Cursor, VS Code extensions security issues.
    159: AI pipelines, 10x faster TypeScript, How to interview How to use LLMs to help you write code and how much electricity does that use? Is your API secure? 10x faster TypeScript thanks to Go!
    158: 🕹️ Super Mario AI 🔑 API keys in LLMs 🤙🏾 Vibe Coding Why is AI playing Super Mario? How is hallucinating the least of our worries and what are rules for developing Safety Critical Code?
    157: CUDA in Python, Gemini Code Assist and back-dooring LLMs We met with a CUDA expert from NVIDIA about the future of hardware, we look at how AI fails and how to play pong on 140 browser tabs.
    156: Enterprise dead, all about Bluesky and React moves on! Learn about Bluesky as a platform, how to build a React App and how to speed up SQL. And play an impossible game in the browser.

    My other work: