A stack of twits

John — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:57:29 +0000

Here at White October towers we pride ourselves on not knowing everything. This is what the internet was made for. So when we are stumped on a problem we hit the Google. These days however our first point of call for any technical programming problems is Stack Overflow. A quick search of that site usually turns up someone else with a similar problem and if we are very lucky someone has posted up a solution. If not we post up a question and people will try their best to post an answer.

As we find it a good resource we try and answer questions on things we know about, in turn for answers you get points and sometimes badges. The badges/points side of things is a little childish but very addictive and a more productive use of time than Youtube.

Recently Stack Overflow released an API and I thought that joining Stack Overflow and Twitter together sounded like a fun reason to play with both websites’ APIs.

So Stack of Twits was born and unleashed to the world last night. Simply it sends you a message on Twitter when a question matches your set of keywords.

I built the site using our framework of choice symfony very quickly. It only took me a few hours over the course of a week or so to get it together. While building it I have made a PHP wrapper for the Stack Overflow API and the plan is to open source this work. Any interest in it pre release please comment below.

Simple shorten url using bit.ly and php

John — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:10:11 +0000

Inspired by the simple tweet to twitter function by Fabian Potencier I have built a stupidly simple url shorter for bit.ly. Something you are probably going to want to do if you are sending tweets via PHP.

function shorten($url, $login, $apikey)
{
  $api_url = "http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version=2.0.1&
                    longUrl=".urlencode($url)."&login=".$login."&
                    apiKey=".$apikey;
  $ret = file_get_contents($api_url);
  $data = json_decode($ret);
  if($data instanceof stdClass && property_exists($data, "errorCode") && $data->errorCode==0)
  {
    foreach($data->results as $result)
    {
      if(isset($result->shortUrl))
      {
        return $result->shortUrl;
      }
    }
  }
  return $url;
}

In the application where I am using this function I have defined the login name and api key as constants, so you can do away with 2 function calls.

Also handily it returns the original url if bit.ly fails.

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A stack of twits

Simple shorten url using bit.ly and php