I am right now in Bucharest, Romania, preparing my slides for the Geek Meet in Craiova tonight. Yesterday I went to the University here to introduce the students to the wonders of YUI. This is just a quick post to give you the slides.

[slideshare id=795181&doc=yuiforcontrolfreaksro-1227812140831161-9&w=425]

More tonight.

Found via the fabulous Searchable Calvin and Hobbes Archive

It’s been a while since I released a full web app (no, shouldiusetablesforlayout doesn’t count), so I thought I spend a few hours and created keywordfinder.org:

It is a service that returns the 20 most successful keywords for a search term you enter and the first 20 sites that come up when you do a search online.

Hopefully this is useful to some, I just had fun playing with BOSS and some YUI CSS to create the whole thing from scratch in one morning :)

I just had a bit of fun with Twitter and the Google charts API. You can now add an image to your blog, web site or wherever and show a picture of what kind of a twitter user you are. All you need to do is embed an image and give it the right source:

For example my user name is codepo8, which would be:

And the resulting image is:

For John Hicks for example it is:

And the resulting image is:

How it is done and how to “change stuff”

You can download the source code and have a play with this (I hope this will not spike my traffic :) so it might go offline if that is the case). There’s really not much magic to this:

First I get the user name and filter out nasties:

$user = $_GET['user'];
$isjs = "/^[a-z|A-Z|_|-|$|0-9|.]+$/";
if(preg_match($isjs,$user)){

Then I set the content type to show the image and use cURL to get the information from the user’s twitter page.

header('Content-type:image/png');
$info = array();
$cont = get('http://twitter.com/'.$user);

I get the information using regular expressions and put them in an associative array:

preg_match_all('/([^>]+)/msi',$cont,$follow);
$info['follower'] = convert($follow[1][0]);
preg_match_all('/([^>]+)/msi',$cont,$follower);
$info['followed'] = convert($follower[1][0]);
preg_match_all('/([^>]+)/msi',$cont,$updates);
$info['updater'] = convert($updates[1][0]);

The convert function removes the comma punctuation added by twitter and makes sure the values are integers. I then need to determine which of the three values is the highest and define a scaling factor as the Google API only allows values up to 100. I then check what the type of the user is by getting the right array key and change the values for displaying.

$max = max($info);
$convert = 100 / $max ;
foreach($info as $k=>$f){
if($f = $max){
$type = $k;
}
$disp[$k] = $f * $convert;
}

I check the type and assemble the display string accordingly:

if($type = ‘updater’){
$t = ’ is an ‘;
}
	
if($type = 'follower'){

$t = ' is a ';

}
	
if($type = ‘followed’){

$t = ’ is being ‘;

}
$title = $user . $t . $type;

I assemble the labels array and the values array and add all up to the correct Google charts API url. I use cURL to get the image and echo it out.

$out = array();
foreach($info as $k=>$i){
$out[] = $k.'+('.$i.')';
}
	
$labels = join($out,'|');

$values = join($disp,',');

$img = get('http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chco=336699&'.

'chtt='.urlencode($title).'&chd=t:'.$values.

'&chs=350x100&chl='.$labels);

echo $img;

}

The rest are the cURL and convert helper functions.

function get($url){
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$feed = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $feed;
}
	
function convert($x){

$x = str_replace(',','',$x);

$x = (int)$x;

return $x;

}
	

You like?

Faster version (one cURL, instead of two)

Instead of setting the PNG header and echoing out the image you can also just set a location header at the end and redirect the URL request to Google’s servers. I guess they have more bandwidth. :)

Continuing my playing around with Yahoo BOSS, I’ve put together a quick WordPress plugin to add keywords to any of your blog posts.

Simply Download the plugin unpack it to your plugin directory and activate it.

Once activated you can use two commands in your blog posts:

[ yahookeywords:parisweb]

This will be replaced by a list of keywords – an HTML list of 10 terms with a CSS class called “yahoo-keywords”.

[ yahootags:parisweb]

This will be replaced by the same list, but each of the terms will be linked as a tag back to your blog.

Live examples:

[yahookeywords:parisweb]
[yahootags:parisweb]