Over the last few weeks I have had potential employers ask to see a code sample. I have not had any recent code that I could share and out of all the code samples I have written the one that got the most inquiries was the YellowPages Content Grabber. This code does not work any longer however. The code is using curl to scrape the HTML and extract the content from the site. I created this a long time ago when I was creating a “local” list of businesses which I could contact to offer my services.
Starting today I am going to completely revamp the code and also fix the regular expressions so that they will actually grab content. I am going to add a front-end to the code so that you do not have to alter code and run this manually from the browser by altering the query string in the URL.
I have started on this today and will be working on it heavily over the next few days until it is completed. At this point I have finalized the fetching of categories and storing them in the database. Now because this code is just for sample code which I will probably turn into an article on this site I am not going to use any special database abstraction layer. I am going to keep it simple and just use the php mysql_* functions.
Stay tuned for more information if you are interested in a complete rewrite of the code I linked to above.
Over the last few days I have been digging deep into the concepts of REST. I have been reading through my copy of RESTful Web Services. Out of curiosity I searched Google for a “php REST library” and it turned up the Official MySpace PHP REST Library.
I started to look through the code and noticed something really weird about how the code is structured. It looks like they are trying to use an Object Oriented approach however I think they are going about things improperly. The code looks a lot like the following.
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I have been working remote for companies for over the last 3 years. I have a solid reputation and am able to perform better from my home office than I am from an in-house position. I am seeking ANY type of employment right now whether it be contract, part time or full time. However I am looking more for full time work.
If you have anything or know of any position please let me know. I was just notified today that my position at my current employer has been dissolved.
I have 10 years of experience with PHP, you can see my resume here.
Over the last month I have been a bit intriqued by the Tom Tom Go 930 that I bought. I am a technical kinda guy so ofcourse I would have to look into how to add points of interestes to the device. Now I know that you can easilly add a POI using the device but you have to do so one by one.
I subscribed to a website that will allow me to download CSV files for different retail outlets, food chains, etc that all contain the latitude and longitude for the locations. I have a list of all Wal-Mart locations in the USA and even though I could download the Wal-Mart POI for the United States through TomTom HOME, what fun is that? I wanted to figure out how to create my own POI files so that I could create a set and share them with the TomTom community.
Today I figured out how to create them however I wrote the code in PHP so it’s not that useful outside of the web world. However now that I know how to create them you can be sure I will be looking into writing an application for Mac OS X that will make life easier for me. Maybe one day I will share the application with the world (so long as it meets my release expectations). It will be a while as I am still learning Cocoa and do not have much free time outside of work and Family Time.
However you can download my Wal-mart POI by clicking the following button: 
Once I make things easier for me I will probably add a nice TomTom page to my site where you will be able to download all of the POI’s that I create. You will also be able to find my POI’s in the TomTom Home software as I will be sharing them with the community there.
One thing that I can say is that TomTom needs to do some work on their documentation or their installation wizard. They state that you can create a CSV file in the format of Longitude,Latitude,Description and then use their wizard to share your POI. This is incorrect because you actually have to use the proper format for OV2 files which is not easy to find.
If you are an established Cocoa Developer and wish to give me a hand with some of the core stuff please leave me a comment and I will get back to you asap.
In a hope to keep visitors on my site and decrease my 80% bounce rate I have installed a plug-in that will show related articles on every article detail page. If you want to see what I mean just click on an article to go to the detail page. The related articles are listed below the post information box.
Do you like this idea?
The last few months have been keeping me so busy that I have not been able to post anything on my blog. I am happy that I am able to post about the public launch of Politics.com.
The site will be going live around 3PM EST today. If you have any interest in politics please head over and see what I have been working on. It has been a long few months but I am proud of what the team and I have accomplished.
Politics.com is a social networking site, think of Facebook and YouTube combined into one with only one topic “politics”.
You can post news, blogs, videos whatever you want. You can even help determine what lands on the front page by contributing to the site. Making comments on or endorsing an article will help it’s overall ranking on the site.
I admit that in the past I have never really been that political but after working on this site I have been paying more and more attention to things. I am still not sure who I want to win or whether I am a Republican or Democrat. I still have more time I am in no hurry to rush my decisions.
Let me know what you think of the site!
This is nothing new for me. My blog is constantly hit with spammers trying to leave comments. THey have not succeeded because I am using the Akismet plug-in for wordpress. However I am starting to wonder if there is a better way to block these guys. I notice every time that they are coming from different IP addresses, so I cannot simply create a blocklist otherwise it would become huge.
I continue to have to monitor my spam queue and find things like this
birkoff_[!2] | birkoff_md@goatrance.com | index5.onirte.com | IP: 201.70.17.163
birkoff_[!2] | birkoff_yc@goatrance.com | index5.onirte.com | IP: 192.41.218.100
Akismet does a really good job so far it has stopped 13,813 spam comments from reaching my site but what I am wondering is if there is a better way to filter these guys out and not allow them to access the site using up bandwidth. If any of you readers know of a good method please share it with me in the comments below.
When you are working with remote data feeds it will definatly impact the load time of your site. For instance if you are using multiple curl calls to reach out to Google and Yahoo to get search results and Google takes 1 second but Yahoo takes 3 seconds it takes your application 4 seconds to load. Now this can add up very quickly if you are making several connections. The load time for your site becomes the total load time of all sites you are reaching out to.
What about simultaneous requests? Well this would make sense because the load time of your application would be as long as the call that takes the longest. In the example above the load time would be 3 seconds as opposed to 4 seconds.
Stoyan Stefanov wrote a nice article with example code showing just how to accomplish thi. I cannot wait to give it a shot and boost the performance of my apps. Thanks for pointing this out Stoyan.
I am still actively looking for a full-time PHP development position with a local company or a company which will allow for remote work. If you have a position available or know of one please let me know. I am also looking for some sub-contract work to fill the void while searching for a job.
I am currently looking for a PHP Developer position at a company that is local to my area or something that will allow remote employees. I am interested in contract positions as well as an on the books employee. If you know of anything please feel free to contact me. All of my information is located on my resume. I have 8 years of experience with PHP/MySQL and I am a Zend Certified Engineer with PHP 4.
