Torrential Web Dev

With Yahoo, Gmail and then MSN all dealt with my attention has turned to AIM. I hadn't been able to find a class specifically designed to grab a contact list from an AIM account but I could find this class which can interact with the AIM network. Using it to grab a list of contacts is actually quite easy. Continue reading "Grabbing an AIM contact list"

This entry is one of a series looking at fetching contacts. For a summary of all the important facts, a demo and the download link please view the MSN contact grab page in the scripts section.

In my ongoing search for php tools to download the contact lists from popular instant messaging services I've completed writing a php class which can download a contact list from the MSN messenger service. This has been a tricky one but it is finally good to go.

It can be test run here and the scripts can be downloaded here.

The class is relatively well commented so it should be easy to use. I hope you find it useful.

It is based on a script available from here. I've altered some of the functions and stripped out those that aren't needed and then just added a function to clean up the output.

I posted a little while ago about my search for scripts allowing the contact lists in popular webmail tools to be downloaded. At the time I was enthusiastic about three scripts which claimed to download the contact lists for gmail, yahoo and msn. Sadly only the script for yahoo worked.

However since then I've found a new tool which with a little work I have been able to coax into downloading the contact list in gmail. Continue reading "Grabbing a Gmail contact list"

I first heard about Webthumb a few weeks ago and thought at the time what a brilliant tool it was. Since then I've been looking forward to playing with the rendering engine it uses. Thankfully it has now been released which I'm pleased about. Webthumb basically takes a snapshot of a site and allows you to download the image as a jpeg. Useful if you want to comment on the design of a site or save an image for future reference. It could also be a useful feature for link directories and the like.

Having said that the web interface is not the best approach to use if you intend to take a screenshot of every site in even a moderately sized link directory. The release of the rendering engine is therefore a welcome development. Released so far is just the rendering engine, not the code that takes the produced image and displays it on the website. If I remember correctly he is not intending to release that code but I can't find where he says that so I may be wrong.

A week last Friday I posted about an article I wrote for the iceteks website looking at handling BBCode using the HTML_BBCodeParser package available from the PEAR repository. I ended the article by talking about alternatives one of which was the Text_Wiki package. In this post I go into a little more detail about using the Text_Wiki and Text_Wiki_BBCode packages. Continue reading "Handling BBCode with Text_Wiki_BBCode"

I've spent the last couple of hours browsing the web looking for a way to 'super-charge' the refer-a-friend functionality on a project I'm currently playing with. Rather than have users type in the email address of a friend I wanted to grab the email addresses from their yahoo, MSN etc accounts (obviously with their permission) and then allow them to just tick the addresses they wanted to refer.

Continue reading "Grabbing contact list from yahoo, MSN & Gmail"

A while ago I wrote a series of two articles for the iceteks site looking at the client-side and server-side aspects of handling BBCode formatted text submitted by users. The parsing and rendering capability of the code in the server-side article was, looking back at it today, fairly poor. To address this I have written a third article looking at using the HTML_BBCodeParser package available through PEAR. There are several parsers available now and my main reason for looking at the HTML_BBCodeParser package was that it was the first parser I discovered after writing the initial series of two articles.

During the article I mention the Text_Wiki package and the add-on package, Text_Wiki_BBCode. My thinking was that if you wanted to offer your users a choice of different formats then Text_Wiki may be a better choice than HTML_BBCodeParser. Although some good tutorials can be found discussing HTML_BBCodeParser I can find very few looking at Text_Wiki and none looking at Text_Wiki_BBCode.

Over the next few days I intend to take a closer look at Text_Wiki and Text_Wiki_BBCode and see just what they are capable of achieving.

An interesting tutorial has been posted at PHPit.net looking at manipulating images with the GD library in PHP. This first tutorial of the series looks at opening, displayng and saving images.

Definitely a series worth following if you are looking at manipulating images in your applications.