LeftLink

LeftLink was a collection of interesting links with re-written headlines. The project slowed to a complete halt due to the time necessary to maintain it manually.

So, it was brought back to life as an aggregation of progressive info using the simple mechanism I put together for iPhoneDeck.

March 25, 2009 | Filed Under Work | Leave a Comment 

iPhoneDeck

iPhoneDeck uses simple PHP with Magpie to display iPhone related information from RSS feeds.

You can easily set something like this up yourself even if you have very little experience with this kind of thing. Download Magpie and upload the magpie folder to your webspace and get started

I set mine up for someone else to manage so I made it as simple as possible to maintain. I also had to add something to it after it was done – otherwise, I might have done it differently. Here is what I did.

First, I include the magpie library

include('magpie/rss_fetch.inc');

and then I set up two associative arrays – one for the RSS and one for the links to the main pages

$ufeeds = array(
	'Digg' => 'http://digg.com/rss_search?search=iphone&area=promoted&type=both&section=all',
	'delicious' => 'http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/popular/iphone?count=20',
);

$homelinks = array(
		'Digg' => 'http://www.digg.com/',
		'delicious' => 'http://www.delicious.com/',
);

and then I iterate over the data and build out the html. 

foreach($ufeeds as $name=>$url) {
	$lname=str_replace(' ','-',strtolower($name));
   	$feed=fetch_rss($url);
	$data=$feed->items;
    echo "<div id=\"$lname\" class=\"news\">\n";
    echo "\t\t<h2><a href=\"$homelinks[$name]\">$name</a></h2>\n";
		echo "<br style=\"clear:both\" />";
		echo "<div id=\"{$lname}-news\" class=\"news-holder\" style=\"height:230px;\">";
	$i=0;
	foreach($data as $item) {
		$i++;
		if($i<21) {
			echo "\t\t<p><a href=\"$item[link]\" class=\"headline\">$item[title]</a></p>\n";
		}
	}
	echo "</div>";

	if($i>10) {
 echo "<div id=\"{$lname}-more\" class=\"more\"><a href=\"javascript:void(0);\" onclick=\"javascript:viewMore('{$lname}');\"  class=\"more\">+ more</a></div>";
 echo "<div id=\"{$lname}-less\" class=\"less\" style=\"display:none;\"><a href=\"javascript:void(0);\" onclick=\"javascript:viewLess('{$lname}');\" class=\"less\">- less</a></div>";
}
	echo "</div>";
}

Then I wrote the JavaScript functions I needed for the expand functionality.

Then I hired someone to do the CSS. :)

March 23, 2009 | Filed Under Projects | Leave a Comment 

Event Tickets Center

I provided a combination of PHP, Perl and JavaScript to solve a cross domain security problem for this website. This was much more difficult than I’ve made it sound but the details are protected by NDA.

February 21, 2007 | Filed Under Work | Leave a Comment 

PhysOrg.com: latest science and technology news

I was hired to write an application that would pull RSS feeds and parse into PHP arrays.

PhysOrg.com: latest science and technology news

February 1, 2006 | Filed Under Clients | Leave a Comment 

Experience