So I just finished making a sample model of Lol Name Checker within my local server. It checks the availability of a username for a game. Theres nothing mind blowing about it because all the information is available to the public on their website and even searching up their match history officially here. In a smart manner, the site compiles his own database based on the content he crawls through from other sites (I assume but this seems the case). What puzzles me is how other websites can obtain in-game data that is not available online (so they cant use php to crawl their web pages for text content). For example in this website. My question is how do they display data without having direct access to their sql database? Or is there an API I am missing for calling these functions that are available to developers (which I doubt)?
Related
My iPhone app links to songs on the iTunes store, through the linkshare affiliate program, up until this point I had been creating the links manually - which albeit is time consuming but I had no problem previously. The application has new songs every day and manually creating the links is getting out of hand. However, having read through all the affiliate program documentation I cannot find a way of linking to a specific track on the store - without using the link builder. The only data on the song I have is the track name, artist name and album name.
Obviously I can use the search api, but that does not seem to enable the affiliate linking - so I cannot benefit from the sales.
http://itunes.apple.com/search?term='.$tracksearch.'&country=gb&media=music&entity=musicTrack&attribute=musicTrackTerm&limit=1
So my question is how would I go about linking to a specific track, through the linkshare affiliate program according to the three pieces of data I have?
(I am using PHP for any basic data interactions - just in case anyone offers any coded methods - bearing in mind i'd like to produce the link on the server so my app can simply fetch the data from there.)
Obviously I can use the search api, but that does not seem to enable the affiliate linking - so I cannot benefit from the sales.
The Search API is exactly the tool you want to use. The API will return you the link you need, it is up to you to affiliate encode the link after you have that information.
The encoding process can be found in the documentation here:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentation/linking-to-the-itunes-music-store.html
Facebook has recently started allowing you to view the newsfeed of people in areas, for example for me I live in leeds and can see 'Leeds Area'.
How would I go about using the PHP SDK to populate a list of these user's ID's for an application? At the moment I'm manually typing these into my application and its becoming rather tedious.
It is my understanding that Facebook user Id's can not be obtained unless a user gives permission of at least user_about_me or higher.
They protect the UserId's well and I know of no known way to acheive it otherwise.
I'm creating a social networking site for books (like Goodreads) and I'd like to include a feature whereby a user can scan the barcode of a book using the webcam and get information about that book.
The functionality for finding the information is already complete. I just need to know how to make the webcam read the ISBN and output it as a string, which I can then feed into my script which fetches the information. At the moment this is just done by filling in a form with the IBSN.
My website is built using PHP.
I can't seem to find a working solution online.
Any ideas of how I could go about implementing this?
Idea would be to use Flash barcode scanner. I've seen flash software that recognizes gestures and so on, so barcode shouldn't be that hard.
Here you can see it implemented: http://gurulib.wordpress.com/2007/12/28/a-flash-based-webcam-barcode-reader/
Suppose you're developing an independent, small sub-page for a big and well frequented web portal.
The sub-page shows entries from a public event calendar, and allows users to highlight those especially interesting to them. The highlighted events shall be highlighted (and maybe shown on a separate list) on each future visit of that user.
However, building a classical user registration system, or any other way of storing the user-highlighted event picks on the server, is not an option: The sub-module needs to be as self-contained and need as little maintenance as possible. It's one of the conditions of the project.
The only way to do this without building a login system of some sort (as far as I can see) is using cookies or some other local storage (Flash / HTML 5....) which has the obvious and big downside that it's tied to the computer, not the user.
Is there a way of storing a few kilobytes data on a per-person basis, but without having to utilize a login or openID, that I am overlooking? A reliable web service perhaps?
A "key/value" storage service, to which I pass a unique key (one that the user specified) and get the savedvalue in return, would be sufficient. There is no need for real security - the data in question is by no means confidential.
OpenID is not an option: It is not well known enough among the audience of the site.
Facebook would be an option, but I don't think they provide "storage" options like this.
As a workaround, I am contemplating offering the user their event picks as a text file download, that also can be uploaded and turned into cookies on another machine. But that is pretty complicated for the user, and thus not perfect.
We have a similar system on our site, where users can bookmark pages to a planner/wishlist function. The saved items are sent via a webservice and stored on our server, and there is a corresponding get webservice.
We have a 'lazy register' system. The first time a user saves an item, they are asked for their email (but no password, as nothing is confidential). This is hashed and saved locally using a cookie, then used to set/get the saved items. When the user uses a different computer they are again asked for their email.
The key is that a register and a login are the same operation, so there is no need for any password reminders or any reset functionality.
The Google Docs API provides programmatic access to Google Docs, where you can create and store documents and spreadsheets. Your application could have its own Google login, which it uses to create one or more documents per user. These documents could be used to store the user settings.
Provided you can get a unique ID from each user (an email address, or something more secure, perhaps), this should be fairly simple. You can even organize the files into folders—one per user.
Alternatively, you could combine Google Docs with the Google Spreadsheets API, where I have just noticed this rather handy feature:
Tables & Records
Interact with spreadsheets as if they're a database
using Tables and Records.
I would like to get the list of XBOX friends for a certain gamercard (http://live.xbox.com/en-US/profile/Friends.aspx) and display it in a widget for my site.
I know that there are alot of iPhone apps that do just that, but I would like to do it on the web, without an iPhone.
Does anyone know of a PHP class to either login via cURL to live.com so that I can scrape the details or if there is a RSS feed somewhere that I can use.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you
Microsoft frowns on screen scraping of the Xbox.com website. If you screen scrape a lot of data, you're likely to get your IP(s) blocked (though, I don't know that it's expressly forbidden by the terms of service or how actively they block IP addresses; it's just that they could).
There is a community XML API for most of the Xbox.com gamer data, but it is not available to the general public. In order to access the API, you need to become a member of the Xbox Community Developer Program (XCDP). Membership is free, but I don't know that the program is accepting new members right now, and I don't know that there is a public website for the program.
As far as I know there is no open API nor you can scrap the data easily as logging in into live is real beach - it does some data manipulations with javascript before submitting the form. So if you want to login you need to either crack that js algorithm or run your own js engine, none of which is easy. I tried doing that some time ago and gave up.