I'm building a PHP web app which requires a dynamic list of images, based on a MySQL database. For example, if the database consisted of "house", "car", and "plane", I'd like to display three images of a house, a car, and a plane. I do not want to store these images locally, because the database will be constantly changing. Instead, I'd like it to query Google Images using PHP and then generate an image URL that I can echo to HTML to display the image. Even better, if it could be customized with a random image index (so it won't use the first image every time), that would be even better.
Can anyone help? Thanks!
Google used to have an image search api (http://code.google.com/apis/imagesearch/) but that has been deprecated. If you need a reliable method I would not advise using anything that is deprecated but that is up to you and your application spec.
Another way would be to curl www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q= and scrape the html that is returned. I believe that this is against Google's TOS so again use with caution.
I would suggest looking into other services than Google. Here is Bings api doc (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd251072.aspx) as an example.
Related
I am trying to create a website that display Google map mark up with my proprietary data (in form of multiple polygons) on top of it.
I have been studying Google Map API and found the only way to do it is to publish my proprietary data in GeoJSON file then use the following api function to load the data to Google map: map.data.loadGeoJson(xxxxxx);
This means I need to publish my proprietary data by web service in GeoJSON format. However, I don't want users to download my proprietary data and use it for another purpose other than my site. This is similar to a website which allows video streaming but not allowing download the whole video offline.
How can I achieve the purpose? Can I use some language like PHP to generate the map (with markup) at server then send to web client in form of HTML? Or if I cannot achieve this by Google Map API, can other map API support it (like Bing?)
Thanks very much for your help!!!!
Code Mon key
One option is to turn your data into a tile layer. This will limit the user to only seeing an image of the data but would not give them access to the raw data. In a worse case scenario they would only be able to take the images and view the data and not do any kind of analytics against it unless they manually trace all the data.
As an added benefit of rendering the data as a tile layer, you will be able to visualize a lot more data. I've built a few systems that can render 500M rows of polygon data on a map using this approach. The cool thing, if you store the data in a spatial database like SQL Azure, you can easily make your data interactive by taking the point a user clicks on a map and searching the database for any shapes that intersect with that point.
I wrote a simple blog post on how to create a web service that does this many years ago here: https://rbrundritt.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/dynamic-tile-layers-in-the-bing-maps-silverlight-control/
There is also a good open source project here that uses ASP.NET: http://ajaxmapdataconnector.codeplex.com/
I have a whitepaper that is a lot more up to date than my blog post that will be published soon. If you email me at ricky_brundritt at Hotmail.com, I'll send you a draft copy.
How can I generate a graph based on data inside my database? For example, I want to display the traffic of a website between a 90 day span, and a graph will display this, like a line graph. I don't like the PHP image and GD functions, they are really pixelated and are actually PHP pages acting like images. I'm not sure if this is how I've seen it done on other websites, but I would like a smooth image.
Great question one awesome solution that i have done is to use: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ The Google Chart has lots of great graphs etc.. you can use. What i did was look at the examples see how the data was formatted, then I wrote my query to match it.
We are downloading images to our computers when we open new webpages. For example: If a webpage has an image(image.jpg), our computer downloads it while we are surfing that page.
Some webpages are using ajax methods. For example: You don't see an image on the page's source codes, however your computer downloads an image. Because, if you click a link on that page, ajax will be showing that image...
Let me show an example:
<div id="ajax_will_load_image_here"></div>
Okay, how can php curl see (or download) that image? Curl can't see that image when I try to use preg_match function. Actually there is an image. I want to download that image by using php curl. Any advice?
If i understand the question correctly there is no convinient way of doing that.
Your crawler/spider would have to parse the website and evaluate javascript.
There are libraries for that but support is very limited.
There are however methods where an actual browser is used to evaulate the page (without displaying it but setting proper environment variables like resolution etc).
Then the generated source including javascript dom modifications is available.
This is for example how the google search previews are generated.
But if you require user interaction it gets pretty specific and complicated.
I am sorry to dissapoint you, but using curl and preg metch the old school way we used to when javascript was not yet so common wont work.
However for most legit use cases this is more than sufficient and websites are today more and more designed to be non-javascript compliant. Especially the content for crawling purposes. It is a must in search engine optimization, and which website doesnt want that?
You see them everywhere. Like the twitter and facebook buttons that show up on blogs and websites that display a number of "tweets" or "likes".
All I need to be able to do is display a number from my MySQL database based on two variables (username and an ID). It would probably be useful to encrypt the variables somehow so that users can't just alter the badge's code and display another user's number.
But more importantly, I just need to know how to use the HTML code like you find in social network badges and have it talk to a PHP script on my server which will calculate the number from the database based on the variables held within the badge.
Any clue where to start?
Edit: I'm not talking about the kind of badges like you find on stackoverflow, I mean the kind other sites let you paste on your blog/site. Like Digg lets you show that your site has been dugg 7000 times, etc.
You may wish to look up the GD library for PHP and related tutorials. Basically, all those badges consist of is a static image as the template with some dynamic text inserted on top, usually consisting of the username and a number (likes, tweets, etc..).
For the HTML code, you would do something similar to:
<img src="http://www.yourserver.com/yourscript.php?username=miki&id=1337" />
This will send a HTTP GET request to your script, causing it to execute. Your script can then communicate with the database, fetch the user's information, use GD to insert that text into a template and then return that to the browser with the correct mime type and content.
You're talking about calling a remote script, essentially.
I assume you mean something like this -
You are viewing your profile on your side. You have a widget that promises to display the total number of points you have, for example.
You offer a "code" button like youtube embed or facebook "like"
The user clicks this, gets a segment of code and is expected to be able to paste it anywhere on the internet where applicable and the code will generate an icon or something with presumably the username and their points.
First, you can do this several ways. The most cost effective, in my opinion, is to generate the user button on your server on update - like say your points meant "number of thumbs up your articles received" so it will be an integer value. Every time you get a thumbs up, you would re-cache the button and write it into a flat text file. If you're good, you would write it to an image and flatten it to a jpg or gif. If you don't know how to do that, you can write it to html and save the file as a user specific "slug" like md5(username).'.html' - that way every time the server is called, you don't need to pile on bandwidth with redundant queries and account look ups. You only serve the optimized image or html file.
Second - you can give the user an iframe that has the html in it. This is generally how facebook "like" does it for people that don't use the fbml method. Problem is, many sites see iframes as potential xss attack and will strip them out. So, in order to make use of the iframe you would need to have control of the domain, which may defeat the purpose of your request if the intention is to share your profile goodies.
Third, you can call a js file on your server that makes an ajax call to your database and serves the results. This is also most likely going to be seen as xss attack and you should probably not even give it much more thought.
I mentioned the iframe and js methods in case you were looking to provide an option for other people who run their own sites. The way "like" is used by site owners to show how many times their domain has been "liked" and so on. These people have control of domains so the iframe and js methods are logical.
So -
This answer may not have much in way of raw code for you, but it should help you start.
I would do the image method since it is safer. You would give the user an image tag with their slug in the src attribute. They can paste it anywhere and there is no way to re-write the number within the image. Most forums and places where you can just post to other people's sites allow images. Just do a google search on drawing images with php, as well as using the imagemagick library to merge text and images.
I'm new to web programming, but I had an idea I could use as an instructional tool, and I was hoping I could get some guidance.
Here's my idea: I want to have some form that takes the data entered by the user, submits each word in the form to google images, and retrieves the first image returned by Google Image Search. Each image should be then be pasted in the current document
What language would I need for this (I read about it being disallowed in Javascript due to cross-site scripting?), what kind of topics would I need to learn, and what would the basic template look like for doing such a task?
Thanks.
personally i would have a PHP interface with a python script that does the work. Have a look at urllib in python. You could also try cURL within PHP and just construct the url yourself. If memory serves however google like you to actually be on their website to see their adverts. Pretty sure they block requests that appear like they come from scripts / webhosts.