A few days back , we published an article about currency conversion using Google calculator API and php. Today we are going to show you how to display current weather information and forecast data using php and Google Weather API.
The API is situated at http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather and the callback URL for a specific place looks like this :
www.google.com/ig/api?weather=PlaceName&hl=en
The returned data in XML form contains information such as current temperature , weather condition , humidity , winds and forecast for the next few days. Continue Reading
Google is a wonderful ! While most of us use it for searching the web for information , few are aware that it has an inbuilt calculator which can also be used for converting a currency into another . Doing so is really simple , you just type ” AMOUNT CURRENCY_CONVERTING_FROM in CURRENCY_CONVERTING_TO ” and search , the inbuilt calculator will give you the result .For example , if one wants to convert 1 U.S Dollar into Euro , he shall type “1 USD in EUR” .
Now lets get to the topic of this post , Google also has a secret calculator API ( http://www.google.com/ig/calculator ) that is usually used for iGoogle gadgets , but since its free and open , anyone can use it .
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Here is a simple php script that will detect if your visitor is coming from Google and then log the keyword used to reach your site to a file. The script logs the visitors ip address along with the keyword and exact date and time to a file in the form x.x.x.x googled for “key word here” on Month Date, Year, at Hours:minutes am/pm. To use the script, just paste the following code into your php pages , and set the variable $log_file appropriately.
Here is the code :
<?php
/* JUST A FEW SETTINGS FIRST
The log file name,
this is where the key words will be stored,
make sure to keep a difficult-to-guess name
for privacy reasons
*/
$log_file="google-keywords-log.log";
/*
Set your timezone (just to make sure you can analyze the data better)
Some useful time zone values :
Asia/Karachi
Asia/Dacca
Asia/Qatar
Asia/Muscat
Asia/Tokyo
for a complete list, refer to http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php
*/
date_default_timezone_set("Asia/Calcutta");
// THE CODE
if (strpos($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’],‘http://google’) OR strpos($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’],‘http://www.google’)) {
$referer=$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’];
$url=parse_url($referer);
parse_str($url["query"],$query);
$data=$_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’]." googled for \"".$query["q"]."\" on ".date("F j, Y,")." at ".date("g:i a")."\r\n\r\n";
$fp=fopen($log_file,"a+");
fwrite($fp,$data);
fclose($fp);
}
?>
Code Explained
We first check to see if our visitor has been refered to our site by google by checking the predefined variable $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"] for occurences of the string http://www.google or http://google using the strpos() function. Then we parse the referer url using parse_url() function. Then we go on to parse the “query” component of the array returned by parse_url() using the parse_str() function which parses the strings as if it were the query string passed via a URL and sets variables in the current scope. Once the string is parsed into the array $query , we can access our keyword term at $query["q"] .Finally we open our log file (set in $log_file ) in the append mode (a+) and append the visitors IP adress, the keyword and date and time to the file.
