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 .
Continue Reading
Nettuts+ recently published a very nice article summarising “30+ Best Practices for PHP Beginners” . The article is a must read for all PHP beginners. Check out the article here :
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/30-php-best-practices-for-beginners/
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 $log_file ) in the append mode (a+) and append the visitors IP adress, the keyword and date and time to the file.
Ever wanted to know when Googlebot (google’s search engine spider) visits your site? . Googlebot can be sniffed (detected) easily using php. It is identifiable by the “Googlebot” string in the HTTP_USER_AGENT field it sends with the headers. Here is a simple function called is_google() which returns TRUE if the visitor is Googlebot, else FALSE.
//The function
function is_google
() {
if (strpos($_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’],
"Googlebot"))
return true
else
return false
}
Usage
To use the function, just call it using an if statement, here is how :
if (is_google())
{
//do something here if the visitor is Googlebot
//like log the date and time to a file/database
}
Some common uses of this function can be :
- Analyzing the visit of Googlebot to your sites
- Spamdexing,Cloaking ( deceiving )
serving different content (like bulk of links,high ranking keywords etc…) to Googlebot for better rankings
NOTE
Using this function for
cloaking and
spamdexing is a black hat SEO technique and can cause your site to be blacklisted by Google
Many times during development involving php, one would want to store some variables as settings. The most common way developers do this is by defining those variables at the beginning of the script. For example, while writing a contact form script, I would like to define a few handy variables first, including admin email, contact log file name/path and etc… The most common way to do this would be to write something similar in your php script.
/******* S E T T I N G S *********/
$admin_email="you@yourdomain.com";
$file="logs/contact.log";
$success_msg="Thanks! your submission was recieved, we will get back to you soon!";
/****** E N D ****************/
Read the rest of the article on Devils Workshop
“Featured Posts” are a key feature of any news/journal wordpress site. It is pretty easy to develop a wordpress theme to display a fixed number of featured posts from a specific category on the homepage. It can be done using the query_posts() function of wordpress. Here are few lines of code that displays latest 10 posts from the news category , you can edit it to tailor to your needs.
<?php
/* Name of your category you want to show posts from */
$cat =
"news";
/* No. of posts to display*/
$num = "10";
?>
<!– Show x Posts from $cat category–>
<?php query_posts(’showposts=’.$num.‘&category_name=’.$cat.”);
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
?>
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<div class="entry">
<?php the_content(‘Continue…’); ?>
<p class="postmetadata">Posted in <?php the_category(‘, ‘) ?> | <?php edit_post_link(‘Edit’, ”, ‘ | ‘); ?> <?php comments_popup_link(‘No Comments »’, ‘1 Comment »’, ‘% Comments »’); ?></p>
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" class="permalink">Link to this article</a>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>
The function query_posts(); can be used to control which posts are displayed in the loop. More information on using query_posts(); can be found here : http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts .
In my latest project i was required to add a community touch to a site by listing the Name, Email, Nickname, URI and Gravatar of all the registered users on the site. I came with the following solution : I made a new page template called users and added the following lines of php to the template :
<?php
/*
First we set how we’ll want to sort the user list.
* ID – User ID number.
* user_login – User Login name.
* user_nicename – User Nice name ( nice version of login name ).
* user_email – User Email Address.
* user_url – User Website URL.
* user_registered – User Registration date.
*/
$sort= "user_registered";
//the default avatar to display in case gravatar is not available for a user
$default = "http://www.somewhere.com/some-directory/some-image.png";
//the size of the gravatar , here 96px
$size = 96;
//Build the custom database query to fetch all user IDs
$all_users_id = $wpdb->get_col( $wpdb->prepare(
"SELECT $wpdb->users.ID FROM $wpdb->users ORDER BY %s ASC"
, $sort ));
//we got all the IDs, now loop through them to get individual IDs
foreach ( $all_users_id as $i_users_id ) :
// get user info by calling get_userdata() on each id
$user = get_userdata( $i_users_id );
//GETTING INFO FROM EACH USERS
//get the user’s email ID
$email = $user->user_email;
//build the gravatar URL
$grav_url = "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?
gravatar_id=".md5( strtolower($email) ).
"&default=".urlencode($default).
"&size=".$size;
//get the user’s full name
$user_fullname=$user->first_name . ‘ ‘ . $user->last_name;
//get the user’s URI
$user_url=$user->user_url;
//get the user’s nickname
$user_nickname=$user->nickname;
//get the user’s description ( the biographical info field, )
$user_profile=$user->description;
?>
<!– Now here you can display each users info using the variables defined above –>
<?php
endforeach; // end the users loop.
?>
If you are looking for online printing company to hang one you should check out Psprint.
Hope you found it useful, cheers 
, WORDPRESS ROCKS
