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.

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.

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

e.g $_POST , $_GET and $_REQUEST .

The library works on defined intrusion patterns which detect a malicious users’ attempts to break your php code and it also allows you to add define your own patterns. This helps to prevent a lot of issues like sql injections, url tempering and others. I have been playing around with it for weeks now and I am impressed with it’s functionality, it’s deninately going to be added into my code base. I would advice that you check it out and see what it can do for you.

Details:
Site     – PHPIDS
Demo     – PHPIDS DEMO
Download – Here

Please remember to read the license before you start using it.

1. 1C++
2. Dot Net
3. Java
4. Perl
5. Python
6. PHP
7. Ruby

I will be using PHP for all the examples on this post, So I hope you have a little understanding of PHP to go through some of the example code.

Requirements for this Exercise:

• Web server(any will do)
• PHP
• Wurfl(download http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/php/index.php)
• wurfl.xml (download xml file)
• Access to htdocs(web server home directory with write permission)

• At least 50 mega bytes of storage(for the wurfl files to be generated).

Step 1:This step can be set up in different ways, It all depends on how you want to use wurfl on your project, I personally use it on more than one project. To avoid creating a wurfl installation for all my projects I have had to set up a global wurfl installation on my web server which allows all my projects to use one wurfl instance.

create wurfl global

go to /www and create a folder called /www/global and inside global create another directory called /www/global/wurfl. We need to create one last directory inside our /www/global/wurfl/ directory which we are going to call /www/global/wurfl/data, Before we close this step please make sure that your directory /www/global/wurfl/data is writeable

chmod 0777 /www/global/wurfl/data

NB chmod 0777 is not recommended on a production server and one must be careful when granting write permission to files. For the sake of the demonstration we will ignore this rule though.

Your directory structure should look like this: /www/global/wurfl/data

Step 2:
Go to wurfl download page and get the PHP files and store them inside /www/global/wurfl directory http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/php/index.php
you need to also download the http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/wurfl.xml(7mb) which contains all the information about the different types of phones in the market. This file is updated constantly and you need to update it on your side regularly. This file must be copied to /www/global/wurfl/data/wurfl.xml

Step 3:
After you uncompress the downloaded PHP files you should have these following files available:1.

1. check_wurfl.php
2. update_cache.php
3. wurfl_class.php
4. wurfl_config.php
5. wurfl_parser.php
6. readme.txt

Step 4:

Now lets configure our library by opening /www/global/wurfl/wurfl_config.php
lets change the config file as shown below.

Line 90:
NB: Make path absolute

// Where all data is stored (wurfl.xml, cache file, logs, etc) define(“DATADIR”, ‘/www/global/wurfl/data/’);

Line 93:
// Path and filename of wurfl_parser.php define(“WURFL_PARSER_FILE”, ‘/www/global/wurfl/wurfl_parser.php’);

Line 96:
// Path and filename of wurfl_class.php define(“WURFL_CLASS_FILE”, ‘/www/global/wurfl/wurfl_class.php’);

That will do for now. If you are interested in some of the configuration settings on this file you can consult the documentation for the library.

Step 5:
We now need to run /www/global/wurfl/update_cache.php on the console which will create a folder called /global/wurfl/data/multicache that has a lot of files inside of it.

/usr/bin/php -f /www/global/wurfl/update_cache.php

After you run the command it will create the folder mentioned above and a file called /www/global/wurfl/data/cache.php. This command will take a while to execute depending on your machine but will take between 30 to 60 seconds to execute. My /www/global/wurfl/data directory’s size is now 37 mega bytes.

Step 6:
Lets write a little test code which determines if the device on our site is a mobile device and if so we can then redirect the device to the mobile version of our site.

Just like that we now have a script that can tell us whether the user is using a computer web browser or phone browser. If the phone is picked up by our script $myDevice->brand = nokia will carry the phone brand while $myDevice->model = N70. But Please remember that this method is not 100% accurate and also keeping an updated version of /www/global/wurfl/data/wurfl.xml will increase the accuracy rate.

$wurfl_class->capabilities holds an array of the device’s capabilities e.g.
can the device support gif images?

Please try and explore the documentation for the library and you will find all sorts of features. For the sake of keeping this post small I will not show any more examples but rather encourage you to read up a bit on this beautiful library. I hope you find this post useful and you get to do magical stuff with this library , Feel free to leave a comment.