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Writing Twitter Bot, the “intellectual one”, in php

What is Twitter? For many it is a place to brag about everyday life events and post pictures. Some use it to promote themselves, corporations and alikes try to provide "customer service" using Twitter and other folks are doing all sorts of things from selling knock-offs to completely illegal stuff.

This article is about how you can use Twitter to promote a site, service or anything you'd like to the tweeps.

It is apparent, that searching for a keyword or a key phrase and responding to all of those would take a lot of time, so we are going to use automated scrip (a twitter [ro]bot), which will do all the job for us.

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Tags: PHP, twitterbot

Make your LEMP website faster by installing eAccelerator

The other day i had a discussion with someone about how fast Java-powered website are, because the code is compiled and serving a page takes a breeze. The point of discussion was me writing code using php, which is a scripting language and compiles code on-the-fly every time you make a request to the website.

So i decided to take a little experiment involving current LEMP (php-fpm/mySQL Linode VPS host) setup for the client's WordPress blog and add eAccelerator to it.

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Tags: eaccelerator, lemp, Linode, php-fpm

Output specific post from a category in WordPress

Let's say you slice a website and need a nicely looking block in a sidebar with one recent post from certain category. Like in case with this one below: Daily Style Quote.

Logically following you need to run "the loop" and ask WordPress for just one post from just this particular category.

Here we go:

 
<div id="dailyStyleQuote">
<div id="quoteText">
      <?php query_posts('category_name=Daily Style Quote&posts_per_page=1'); ?>
      <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post();
  			the_content('');
		?>
        </div>
<div id="quoteBottom">
			<?php the_time('l, F j, Y'); ?>
<?php
		$category_id = get_cat_ID( 'Daily Style Quote' );
    		$category_link = get_category_link( $category_id );
?>
            <a href="<?php echo $category_link; ?>">archive</a>
		</div>
 
        <?php endwhile; ?>
    </div>
 

Tags: PHP, wordpress, wordpress template

Page permalinks in WordPress

Got myself puzzled for a bit while slicing a WordPress theme this weekend on how to get a permalink to a certain page in WordPress template, given that you know what's page title. Use this:

 
<?php echo get_permalink(get_page_by_title("Page title here")->ID); ?>
 

So now in your template you can use like this:

 
<a href="<?php echo get_permalink(get_page_by_title("About")->ID); ?>">About</a>
 

Tags: PHP, wordpress, wordpress template

Zip a folder on the server with php

I have a spent a day today figuring how to zip a client's web site folder on a Godaddy shared Linux hosting today (they made sure users don't have SSH access on those) in order to transfer it to another server. Apparently, given the limitations of the account setup the best way was to write a php script by executing which i would zip the given folder contents, so that then i could copy just one file and unzip it on the target server.

And it can't be easier than that - if you have a folder, which contains a number of other folders and files in them the script below lets you add to the zip file quickly and easily:

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Tags: godaddy, PHP, zip