Posts Tagged ‘php’

Authenticate your website using Facebook Connect API

Monday, June 15th, 2009

Facebook connect API allows users to dynamically connect their identity information from Facebook, such as basic profile, friends, photos information and more, to third party websites, as well as desktop and mobile applications.  The article here describes how to provide Facebook Connect authentication for your web application.

Steps to connect your site to Facebook :

1. If you don’t already have a Facebook API key for your site, create an application with the Facebook Developer application.

  • Go to http://www.facebook.com/developers/createapp.php to create a new application.
  • Enter a name for your application in the Application Name field.
  • Accept the Developer Terms of Service, then click Save Changes.

    • If you have a Facebook API key,follow from next step

  • On the Basic tab, keep all of the defaults.
  • Take note of the API Key, you’ll need this shortly.
  • Click the Connect tab. Set Connect URL to the top-level directory of the site which will be implementing Facebook Connect. You can include a logo that appears on the Facebook Connect dialog. Next to Facebook Connect Logo, click Change your Facebook Connect logo and browse to an image file. The logo can be up to 99 pixels wide by 22 pixels tall, and must be in JPG, GIF, or PNG format.
  • If your site is going to implement Facebook Connect across a number of subdomains of your site , you need to enter a Base Domain
  • Click Save Changes.

2. Create a cross-domain communication channel file called xd_receiver.htm and place it in a directory relative to the Connect URL that you entered in the previous step. Include following script into this file.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<body>
<script src="http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/XdCommReceiver.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
</body>
</html>

3. Next, in your Home Page ,ie page of facebook connect page,Place Html tag as following

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">

4. include following javascript file with in your body tag NOTE IN HEAD TAG

<script src="http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/FeatureLoader.js.php" type="text/javascript"></script>

5. Place facebook login Button in your page

<fb:login-button></fb:login-button>

6. Finally, Include following script after the login button

<script type="text/javascript"> FB.init("YOUR_API_KEY_HERE", "<path from web root>/xd_receiver.htm"); </script>

You should now be able to click on the facebook connect logo and use your facebook credentials to login to your web site.

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Posted in Categorized, Development | 2 Comments »

Generating a Google Sitemap via PHP

Monday, June 15th, 2009

A sitemap is  an XML file,that lists the URLs of a site.  The sitemap file can be used to inform search engines like google on the pages available on a site and when those pages have been modified.  The search engines require a particular format for the sitemap xml file. Let me give a brief on sitemap creation for google.

Create an xml file(say sitemap.xml). Its better to create the xml file dynamically using the scripting language like php, jsp etc.

Format of sitemap xml  accepted by google:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>http://domain.tld/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.1</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

The points to be remembered when creating a sitemap are:

1. Sitemap should start with the tag <urlset> and end with </urlset>
2. Each set of xml entry shouild start with <url> and end with </url>
3. <loc></loc> contains the url
4. The <lastmod> tag expects a date in the  format YYYY-MM-DD,  or the date format can be in w3c format.
5. The <changefreq> tag expects one of the  values: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly etc.
6. The <priority> can be a value between 1.0 and 10

7. Replace special charecters from xml file.
Character                   Replacement
Ampersand     &         &amp;
Single Quote    ‘         &apos;
Double Quote  “         &quot;
Greater Than   >        &gt;
Less Than       <        &lt;

8. Encoding should be UTF-8 mode
9. The maximum permitted size of a sitemap file is 10 MB.

Sample PHP  code for sitemap generation:

$xml = '';
$xml =  "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>"."\n";
$xml .= "<urlset xmlns:xsi=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\" xsi:schemaLocation=\"http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd\" xmlns=\"http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9\">"."\n";
for($i=0;$i<$subLimit;$i++){
$title = str_replace("&","&amp;",strip_tags($response['title']));
$loc = str_replace("&","&amp;",strip_tags($response['location']));
$com = str_replace("&","&amp;",strip_tags($response['company']));
//$loc1 = $row['job_jobs_location'];
$title = htmlentities($title, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
$com = htmlentities($com, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
$loc = htmlentities($loc, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
$date = $response['date'];
$date = strtotime($date);
$date = date(DATE_W3C, $date);   //Date in w3c format
$xml .= "<url>"."\n";
$xml .= "<loc>http://www.jobtreks.com/jobresult/$title/$com/$loc/$id</loc>"."\n";
$xml .= "<lastmod>$date</lastmod>"."\n";
$xml .= "<priority>0.50</priority>"."\n";
$xml .= "<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>"."\n";
$xml .= "</url>"."\n";}
$xml .= "</urlset>";
$fh = fopen('sitemap.xml', 'w'); //After exceuting this file, an xml file called sitemap.xml is created.
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Using Solr / Lucene for full text search with MySQL DB

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Solr is a standalone webservice application that can be installed on any servlet container like tomcat, jetty etc.  It uses the popular Lucene java library to provide enterprise level search results from databases, filesystem, web services etc.    Solr runs as a web service, so in effect it provides a cross platform search engine.  The results can be accessed from php, java, RoR or .NET by invoking its web service.  The only requirement on your server is that it should allow you to run java application or have deploy solr as a webapp in an existing servlet container such as tomcat or jetty.

This article shows how to get Solr index and provide search results for a simple MySQL table.  The search results will be provided in XML, so you can get your web application to read the results, parse it and display it any form desired. (more…)

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Posted in Categorized, Development | 22 Comments »

We are Hiring!

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

Cabot is in a growth phase and we are looking for some good talented individuals with a can-do attitude to join our team.  We have openings for Senior LAMP Developers, Flex and ActionScript Developers and Project Managers.    Take a look at our careers page for more details.

If you are a Java Developer with strong OOPs understand and have a desire to get into the exciting world of Rich Internet Application development using Adobe Flex and AIR, we would like to hear from you too.

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