How I built icant.co.uk – source code

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: cambridge, fowa, howto, php, yql, YUI