Netvibes 2.0

My favorite Web 2.0 application Netvibes just came to second big revision with code name “Cinnamon”.

At first I was disappointed with changes. Although they announced tons of new features, I saw only small changes in user interface and few new modules. However, more changes are about to come, because Cinnamon is actually “a three-month release cycle, where you will see new features and upgrades throughout that time”.

So far I’ve noticed new splash screen, slightly changed interface, and couple of new modules like “Blog Search”, Video Search etc.

Blog Search
Blog Search

Netvibes u Akciji
Netvibes in Action

Hacking Webalizer

Few weeks ago I found a way to install Webalizer on DreamHost. Webalizer is a little bit of an obsolete utility (comparing to Google Analytics Webalizer stats look rude), but still has some advantages. One of the biggest is that it is still used by many hosting solutions, so you don’t have to change all of your site(blog) pages just to make sure Google will track your stats.
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Spam Carma 2

If you run Word Press based blog, and getting a lot of spam comments on it, this plugin is right for you.

Unlike other spam killers (like Akismet plugin which behave badly with non english comments), Spam Carma 2 kills 100% of spam, and never have a problems with regular comments.

Spam Carma 2 contains several spam filters, where restriction for each of them can be set to higher or lower level. For example, there is a Stopwatch which make sure commenter has been on page for a certain number of seconds before commenting, Javascript Payload which embed a few Javascript commands in comment form (users with JS turned off only receives a small penalty) and plenty of other stuff like captcha check which is displayed only if commenter is not recognized as normal user.

Since I’ve installed it, Spam Carma killed more than 300 spam commenters without actually stopping any regular comment!

Curl HTTP Client

Frequently, in my daytime job I have to fetch data from various url’s, either by sending get or post request, binding to different IP address etc. Long time I used my own socket based HTTP class, although I wasn’t quite happy with perfomances and various other things with it. I already used curl cli tool (mostly for debugging purposes), but didn’t really liked it’s php api, so I’ve decided to take some spare time and make some kind of oop wrapper for it, which should be easier to use for easy stuff like sending get/post request etc.

I use this class several months since then, and it evolved over time whenever I needed some new feature. Since various of my colleagues found it very usefull (some of them even sent me new methods for it), I’ve decided to put it out for public. Recently I submitted a code to phpclasses.org, and today got confirmation that class is officially approved.

Update 03/01/2007
New version 1.1 released with new features: fetch into file, upload, proxy etc.

Update 15/02/2008
New version 1.2 released with few bug fixes. New features are ability to send post string as string argument in send_post_data method, ability to accept gzipped content, close curl session etc.
You can download class and example files from here.

Here are few usage examples.

<?php
/**
 * @version $Id$
 * @package dinke.net
 * @copyright © 2005 Dinke.net
 * @author Dragan Dinic
 */

require_once("curl_http_client.php");

$curl = &new Curl_HTTP_Client();

//pretend to be IE6 on windows
$useragent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)";
$curl->set_user_agent($useragent);

//uncomment next two lines if you want to manage cookies
//$cookies_file = "/tmp/cookies.txt";
//$curl->store_cookies($cookies_file);

//Uncomment next line if you want to set credentials
//$curl->set_credentials($username, $password);

//Uncomment next line if you want to set specific referrer
//$curl->set_referrer("http://my.referrer.url");

//if you want to send some post data
//form post data array like this one
$post_data = array('login' => 'pera', 'password' => 'joe', 'other_foo_field' => 'foo_value');
//and send request to http://www.foo.com/login.php. Result page is stored in $html_data string
$html_data = $curl->send_post_data("http://www.foo.com/login.php", $post_data);

//You can also fetch data from somewhere using get method!
//Fetch html from url
$html_data = $curl->fetch_url("http://www.foo.com/foobar.php?login=pera&password=joe&other_foo_field=foo_value");

//if you have more than one IP on your server,
//you can also bind to specific IP address like ...
//$bind_ip = "192.168.0.1";
//$curl->fetch_url("http://www.foo.com/login.php", $bind_ip);
//$html_data = $curl->send_post_data("http://www.foo.com/login.php", $post_data, $bind_ip);
?>

Google Page Creator

Don’t know about you, but I have difficulties to follow up with all services Google announce almost each day. GMail, GMap, GTalk, GCal, GSpreadsheets, … and lately we got Google Page Creator.

Google Page Creator is another one Web 2.0 application, which allow us to create Web Pages in a snap. Like with others simmilar tools, you don’t have to know html or any other technology, all you need is your browser and little creativity. Unlike other tools Page Creator is very easy to use (thanks to very good Ajax implementation), so in as little as 5 minutes you can come up with your new Web Site. Such site will be indexed by google shortly, and will be hosted free on address like: http://yourgoogleaccount.googlepages.com.

You can see results of my 5 minute Page Creatoru session here :)

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