OnWebApps says your app is not going to be the next Twitter and then explores the logic behind building with scalability in mind versus thinking practically…
Posts Tagged ‘PHP’
Install a WAMP Environment with Ease
January 19, 2007 – 9:34 am
For anyone that’s had to install a WAMP (Windows Apache Mysql PHP) environment with any level of regularity, it sure gets old doesn’t it?
It seems that no matter what I do to standardize the process every install ends up different with its own nuances and required troubleshooting.
I can’t go for too long without itching the desire to re-install my dev environment in an effort to make sure it’s “clean”. I suppose that sort of mindset comes after using windows for so long and seeing things slowly self-corrupt over time. In any event, I’ve been putting off a re-installation of the environment on my laptop simply because of the amount of time involved in doing so.
I’ve been so busy with development that I simply can’t afford to take my system down and rebuild it. If only there was an easier way… and that’s when I remembered a site that I had bookmarked a while back called apachefriends.org.
Apache Friends’ main project it is an Apache, Mysql, PHP installer called Xampp. Xampp not only installs on a Windows environment but also on Linux, Solaris and OS X.
Well an installer should take no time at all so I backed up my current environment, gave it a shot and haven’t looked back since. Thanks Apache Friends!
PHP & Last.fm/Audioscrobbler’s API
November 9, 2006 – 10:50 am
Like many others out there, I’ve chosen to display the album covers of my most recently listened to songs in my blog’s sidebar. It was with this expressed intention in mind that I set up a Last.fm account to start tracking my listening habits.
Present Solution
Right now I’m successfully displaying this information using Dirk’s Last.fm widget which nicely piggybacks Automatic’s Sidebar Widget. Although temporary, I’ve been very happy with this setup and I encourage anyone out there using Wordpress as a blogging platform to consider this plugin combination.
That being said, this seems like the perfect opportunity to introduce myself to API offerings from Last.fm.
Inspired in large part by J Wynia’s article on this same subject; I’ll stick to his approach and more or less follow his example to create the skeletal page he introduced about a month ago.
What’s in the Data?
The data available with the Last.fm API is currently accessible in four formats: Plain text, XML, XSPF and RSS.
XML is available for every displayed data offering while the other three are more sporadically available; because of that, we’ll stick to XML in our examples.
Before working with the data, you need to take a look at it of course. To do that, simply append “?wsdl” to the end of the XML URL (e.g., http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/jrob00/topalbums.xml?wsdl) and your browser (I’m using Firefox) should nicely spit out something similar to this screenshot.
Feeding PHP
Let’s take a look at a simple script to get this data into PHP. First assign the URL… Read More