what is php feeds and what I am hoping to achieve with it ?
 is the question that I closed off with yesterday and today I will explain the vision I had when I came up with the idea.

I read a lot of feeds daily and throughout the years I have built up a very big list of feed subscriptions from different technology sites that i try to keep up with on a day to day base, but the problem I encountered was that I had to go through lots of feeds daily to only find one relevant piece of news that was important to me and in this particular case php  news/articles/ tutorials is what I was interested in – Then friendfeed.com  was launched and I saw what I wanted but could not explain this whole time , the idea started to take form then which was to take all feed subscriptions and put them in one place and at the same time apply filtering to them so that I only see what I wanted with less effort ,  phpfeeds.co.za was then born.

So whats the plan now?
I want to expand phpfeeds.co.za from just offering links to a collection of php news,article and tutorials but to also have a directory of all the php frameworks , libraries and extensions available on the Internet .

1) PHP frameworks

•   Directory Listing all known php frameworks available on the internet
•   Allow developers who use the frameworks to rate / comment and review the frameworks instead of  the typical blogs you get comparing php frameworks which the blogs themselves are written in some cases by the same folks who built the frameworks.
• Highlight framework relevant information about the availability of documentation , tutorials and forums where one can get help. crucial when you are in the market for a new framework 

2) PHP Libraries

•  A categorized directory listing of all known php libraries especially ones which make a big difference e.g. Simple Pie, Nusoap , Swift mail and phpmailer just to mention a few.
• Allow developers to rate / review and comment on their usefulness.
• Add Tutorial sites that deal with these libraries

3) Extensions

•  Link extensions available on pecl to sites that offer documentation and tutorials.
•  Relevant Material about writing extensions.  

Thats is all i have for now and will update this when I think of more things to add but for now my plate if full. Tomorrow I will discuss the technology stack that I will be using on this project – stay tuned.

About 5 months ago , I launched  http://www.phpfeeds.co.za to the world which was my first attempt at learning the php symfony framework . I have improved my skills since then with the framework and It has become my favorite php framework from all the ones available out there. On a sour note though I have not had time to work on http://www.phpfeeds.co.za since then and the website is still in Alpha mode.

I have decided as of today to go back to the drawing boards and rework the site until it’s done. I will be documenting the process on a daily base on this blog and you are more than welcome to give input about the technology, functionality and other ideas you might have but I ask that your ideas must help me reach my goal instead of derailing me from it.

The next logical question is, what is php feeds and what I am hoping to achieve with it ? read tomorrow for the answer.

I am a very lazy person in general and if I can automate a manual process then it shall be automated. I have created a tiny script which gets all my downloads from hotfile and rapishare, but will focus on hotfile for now.

The script is not entirely my idea I just put together pieces that I found while scrapping through the internet and I hope it will help you.

Step 1:
NB: Please make sure you have a premium hotfile account otherwise you might as well stop reading.
we need to create a hotfile cookie for your server so please execute the following code in a command console.

wget –save-cookies /path/to/hotfilecookie –post-data “returnto=%2F&user=yourusername&pass=yourpass&=Login” -O – http://www.hotfile.com/login.php > /dev/null

The command we just executed allowed us to build a cookie file which we will load when doing are downloads and will allow of us to utilize our hotfile premium account.

Step 2:
 We need to create a file which will use to store our download list, Our server will read and download all the links stored on the file.

In your download server directory e.g /home/dl/ create a file by executing “touch .wget-hotfile-list “ and please check the permissions we have on the file since we need to able to execute , read and write to the file.
 
Step 3:
We now need to write the bash script that will take care of our download process, first thing  – lets create a bash script and give it a name e.g.  “touch wget_server_hotfile.sh“  and open the file with your favourite editor and insert this code snippet.

#!/bin/sh
# .wget-hotfile-list: manage the list of downloaded files

# invoke wget-list without arguments

while [ `find .wget-hotfile-list -size +0` ]
 do
  url=`head -n1 .wget-hotfile-list`
   wget -c –load-cookies /path/to/hotfilecookie  $url
   sed -si 1d .wget-hotfile-list
 done

Please make sure you enter the path we used in Step 1 when we were creating the cookie file. and lastly make sure that your script is executable by running “chmod +x wget_server_hotfile.sh“ .

Step 4:
We are now almost done, just a couple of loose ends to tire up. Please login to your hot-file premium account and make sure that your enable the option “direct downloads“. Once thats done you are now ready to run the server , first open the file we created in Step 2 “.wget-hotfile-list“ and start pasting your download links inside e.g.

http://hotfile/download/96747859/myfile1.tar
http://hotfile/download/96747859/myfile2.tar
http://hotfile/download/96747859/myfile3.tar
http://hotfile/download/96747859/myfile4.tar

Save and close the file then run the bash script we created in Step 3 “./wget_server_hotfile.sh” then your download should start. 

NB:
The bash script terminates once all the entries in  “.wget-hotfile-list“ have been downloaded .
  
Here is a list of sites that helped me get this process working and all credit should go to those guys and not me.
http://www.g-loaded.eu/2007/09/15/use-wget-or-curl-to-download-from-rapidshare-premium/
http://lampbear.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/use-wget-to-download-from-hotfile-automated/
http://friendfeed.com/kris/c9a389b8/use-wget-to-download-from-hotfile-automated-web