Posts Tagged ‘snippets’
March 5th, 2010
For those of you who are not familiar with the project management software called The Trac Project please proceed to the Trac Guide. I’ve been working with this project management tool for quite some time now and the latest upgrades are just awesome. I believe the solution for private projects’ RSS feeds has been found a few months ago somewhere here. The iCalendar issue remains, but it’s probably solved the exact same way – http authentication, although not all iCalendar clients and RSS aggregators support that yet. My favourite Feedly doesn’t.
Effective Project Management with Trac
Before showing off the snipets that I wrote for Trac Reports I’d like to give you one little hint if you’re running Trac on an old (but stable) OS version, such as Fedora Core 8. Amazon EC2 still ships the Fedora 8 operating system as default for Linux-based EC2 instances, and a simple yum install trac will get you version 0.10.x, which is outdated. The trick here is to install:
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| yum install python-setuptools
yum install python-setuptools-devel |
Which include a package called easy_install. Since you’ve got an old version of Trac installed, use easy_install to update it, like this:
Bam! Wasn’t that easy? One more situation where you can use easy_install is to install Trac plugins directly from their repositories (instead of the old way by uploading source files).
Okay, now back to the reports. I made these with a little experimenting with the Trac database. It’s structure is pretty much transparent and obvious, so if you’re an SQL genius then go ahead and write your own. Here’s my most useful list …
Read the rest of this entry »
November 13th, 2009
This may seem like an easy task to do but is quite tricky in WordPress. Using a CDN these days is very popular, cheap and helps speed up your website taking the load off your web server. I personally love Amazon CloudFront! The tips at Google Code suggest you serve all your static content from different domains, preferably ones without cookies, so CDNs are perfect.
Serving Static Content From CDNs
All the problem with WordPress is script dependancies, and this applies not only to jQuery but to all the other predefined javascript libraries (prototype, scriptaculous, thickbox, see wp_enqueue_script for more info). It’s all about the handles and plugins that use jQuery will probably use the jquery handle in their dependency lists, which will automatically make WordPress include the standard jQuery from its wp-includes directory. This means that using the code:
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| wp_enqueue_script("my-handle", "http://s.kovshenin.com/jquery.js"); |
You might end up including two instances of the jQuery library, one from your CDN (s.kovshenin.com) and another one from the WordPress wp-includes directory, which will end up in a total mess. Strange though, that you cannot redefine an already known handle, such as jquery like this:
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| wp_enqueue_script("jquery", "http://s.kovshenin.com/jquery.js"); |
The javascript library will still be loaded from the default location (wp-includes on your local web server). So the right way to do it is with a little hack in your functions.php file (in case you’re doing it within your theme) or any other plugin file (in case you’re doing it within your plugin):
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| add_filter('script_loader_src', 'my_script_loader_src', 10, 2);
function my_script_loader_src($src, $handle)
{
if ($handle == "jquery")
return "http://s.kovshenin.com/js/jquery.1.3.2.min.js";
return $src;
} |
Then any call to wp_enqueue_script with the jquery handler will output the correct path to your CDN version of jQuery. Oh and please, try not to use generic function names like my_script_loader_src, I used that just as an example, we don’t want any function name conflicts and can’t expect other plugin/theme developers to use non-generic names ;)
October 22nd, 2009
A few days ago I started looking deeper into the Google Code APIs and threw a few experiments using the Google Documents List Data API. Unfortunately, the only library they have for the third version of their protocol is written in Java. There is a PHP wrapper for the first version of the protocol, but it totally depends on the Zend Framework. Here’s a little code snippet for logging into a Google Docs account (writely) using ClientLogin with Curl and PHP. The Auth string is stored into the $auth variable for later use.
Playing with the Google Docs API
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| // Construct an HTTP POST request
$clientlogin_url = "https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin";
$clientlogin_post = array(
"accountType" => "HOSTED_OR_GOOGLE",
"Email" => "yourgoogle@email.com",
"Passwd" => "yourgooglepassword",
"service" => "writely",
"source" => "your application name"
);
// Initialize the curl object
$curl = curl_init($clientlogin_url);
// Set some options (some for SHTTP)
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $clientlogin_post);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_ANY);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
// Execute
$response = curl_exec($curl);
// Get the Auth string and save it
preg_match("/Auth=([a-z0-9_\-]+)/i", $response, $matches);
$auth = $matches[1];
echo "The auth string is: " . $auth; |
ClientLogin assumes you login once and use the auth string for all on-going requests (more info: ClientLogin – Google Code). Here’s a simple example of how to retrieve some data from a Google Docs account, show filename, author and file type. Make sure the simplexml php extension is installed and activated.
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| // Include the Auth string in the headers
// Together with the API version being used
$headers = array(
"Authorization: GoogleLogin auth=" . $auth,
"GData-Version: 3.0",
);
// Make the request
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://docs.google.com/feeds/default/private/full");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, false);
$response = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
// Parse the response
$response = simplexml_load_string($response);
// Output data
foreach($response->entry as $file)
{
echo "File: " . $file->title . "<br />";
echo "Type: " . $file->content["type"] . "<br />";
echo "Author: " . $file->author->name . "<br /><br />";
} |
It seems though that Google Docs is purely for documents (spreadsheets and presentations) but not for actual files, as a JPEG I uploaded turned into a text/html type. It opens up in the text editor when viewing in Google Docs, and the nearest-to JPEG export format is PDF (just like all the other documents). So I guess there’s no way of reading and manipulating the raw image as if I would read and manipulate a file.
I came across a cool website which I believe the Googlers have made – Data Liberation:
Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to make it easier for them to move data in and out.
I’m working on a little project that involves image (and file) hosting, so the products I’m interested in are Google Docs and Picasa Web Albums. It seems that none of the two make it possible to store and work with files as if it was a flash disk or an FTP server. Google Docs is the closest one but there’s a huge limit on what kind of files you can upload and store. Picasa on the other hand is good for image storing, but the only way to export a set of images is to use their desktop software and Picasa Web, and of course no actual control over the files (edit, delete) via their Picasa Web API. If only it were a little bit closer to Amazon S3 …
Oh and you should probably use OAuth or AuthSub when working with Web Applications and Google APIs but anyways, this was just a quick example.
September 29th, 2009
Yet another WordPress code snippet ;) I’ve got two major categories in my upcoming project – Blogs and Arts. In the archive, somewhere in the sidebar, I’d like to output the recent comments only from the chosen category, excluding the ones that are from the other category. The most difficult part here is to figure out proportions, because running this hack recursively may eat up all your memory. For instance you have two categories and you’d like to output 10 comments for each. The posts in the first category get commented twice as often as the posts in the second category, so the proportions here would be approximately 2:1, but it also depends on how often “the switch” is.
Working with the WordPress Comments API
For instance, taking 20 comments in a stream (one after the other, ordered by publish date), imagine the first 10 are from the first category and the last 10 are from the second. You’d have to query at least 20 comments to retrieve the needed amount. Here’s another example – take 90 comments in a stream, 60 are from the first, 30 are from the second. You need 10 comments for each, your ratio is 2:1 but you need to cycle at least 70 comments to make sure you display 10 from the second category. I know this is insane, but you’ll get my point when you’ll lack a few comments in your sidebar, especially if the widget is titled “10 recent comments” ;)
Here’s the code:
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| <?php
$show_comments = 10;
$i = 0;
$comments = get_comments("number=50&status=approve");
foreach ($comments as $comment)
{
$comm_post_id = $comment->comment_post_ID;
if (!in_category("blogs", $comm_post_id))
continue;
$i++;
// Output the comment, author and whatever you need
// I'll just output the comment excerpt to keep my code simple
?><li><?php comment_excerpt(); ?></li><?php
if ($i >= $real_comments) break;
}
?> |
So 50 is the number that you need to figure out. Don’t take too much if you don’t need to, otherwise you’ll just be getting too much rows from your database that you’ll never use and slow down your application. Run a few tests, use a logger for debugging and make sure you’re caching the results.
September 8th, 2009
I’m very busy this week setting up a new router here at the office, but I do find some interesting stuff that might be somehow useful to you. Like this shell script I wrote a few hours ago that reads a text file with different hosts on each line (google.com, yahoo.com, etc) and returns a new file with their resolved, i.e. ip addresses on each line. I’m not sure where you’d want to use this, but I’ve setup a server with two internet connections. One is pretty fast but expensive, the second one is slower but free. I made the most useful websites (google.com, etc) go fast and expensive (eth0), and less useful ones (facebook.com, etc) go slower and free of charge (wimax0). I store the useful hosts in a file called special and I use this script (which I called parsehosts.sh) to resolve it to special.resolved:
#!/bin/sh
filename=$1;
echo Parsing ${filename}
output_filename="${filename}.resolved";
echo > ${output_filename}
while read -r LINE ; do
host $LINE | grep "has address" | sed -e "s/.*has address //" >> ${output_filename} ;
done < ${filename}
echo DoneTo invoke the script use:
[root@localhost ~] ./parsehosts.sh special
This generates special.resolved, which I then use in my iptables script to route certain directions. Note that you should chmod +x parsehosts.sh before trying to execute it.
