Obvious Ideas

Just read on TheNextWeb that Facebook is about to allow users to switch from profile urls like http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1234567890 to http://www.facebook.com/username. Awesome, right? They will open up the registration on Saturday, June 13. On the registration page there’s currently nothing, but a countdown until registration is open.

If you have a common name and you’re afraid that your username will be taken (like I do), you probably want some alert before the countdown reaches 0. Well, that’s exactly why I created the @fbname Twitter bot.

Just follow @fbname and it will DM you 1 hour before the registration of vanity urls is actually available on Facebook.

Enjoy
Arik

The Mr. Tweet people announced their new API to the public and I’ve just published on GitHub my PHP Wrapper for the Mr. Tweet API.

PHP Wrapper for Mr.Tweet’s V1 API
API Doc: http://api.mrtweet.com/v1/docs

It uses libcurl and requires PHP 5 >= 5.2.0 for json_decode.
Of course, you can rewrite to use other json decode funtions (or SimpleXMLElement for the XML response) and something
different than libcurl.

While it very straightforward, see MrTweetApiTest.php for example of usage.

Used originally for Topify (http://topify.com/).

Their API is in alpha right now, so you need to request an API key by emailing api@mrtweet.com.

Would love to hear comments and to see people forking it!

Arik

Saw on @toolmantim’s blog that he turned his blog into a tea pot. He even made a Rack middleware that can turn any Rake app into a teapot. “Cool! it can be cool addition to Topify, too”, I thought to myself. The problem? Topify is PHP and not Ruby. The solution? 6 lines of PHP code:

And now you can do :

arikfr:~ arik$ curl -i -X BREW http://topify.com/
HTTP/1.1 418 I’m a teapot
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 08:51:07 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.59 (Unix) PHP/5.2.6 DAV/2
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6
Content-Length: 29
Content-Type: text/html

We do serve ICE Tea, though.

It’s not as elegant as Ruby code or Ruby gem, but it does the work.

If you use this on your own server, please ping me. I would love to hear

Posted via email from Arik’s posterous

bit.ly is the url shortner we all been waiting for since the creation of tinyurl. It’s simply awesome.

Posted via email from Arik’s posterous

I really like the built in screen capture ability of OS/X. I specially like the ability to easily take a screen capture of only part of the screen by using Cmd+Shift+4. What I didn’t like was the fact that it created a hell of a clutter on my desktop with all that screenshots.

Cluttered Desktop

For long time I’ve been just manually moving the screenshots to different folders / deleting them. But today I decided that enough is enough and looked for a solution. And of course a simple solution exists. To save you the reading here’s a summary of what you need to do:
1. Open the Terminal.
2. Create a new folder for the screenshots by using mkdir, i.e.

mkdir /Users/Arik/Desktop/Screenshots

3. Run the following command:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location [the-folder-you-created-in-step-2]

That’s it. Almost. Now you need to logout and login again in order for the changes to take effect. Instead you can use the following command (from Terminal):

killall -HUP SystemUIServer

Now you really done.

Hope it helps.
Arik

Recently for Topify I needed to shorten some long urls (our invite links) and my obvious choice of shortener was bit.ly. I tried looking for PHP wrapper for their API, but only found this project which was way more than I needed. So I’ve decided to write my own simple client using the Zend Framework HTTP Client. Here’s the result:

<?php
function bitly_shorten ($url) {
    $client = new Zend_Http_Client('http://api.bit.ly/shorten');
    $client->setParameterGet(array(
        'version' => '2.0.1',
        'longUrl' => $url,
        'login' => 'arikfr',
        'apiKey' => 'R_03feadf27c1c7c1a1ac3c3e7d6d41a27'
    ));    

    $response = $client->request();
    if ($response->isSuccessful() ) {
        $phpNative = Zend_Json::decode($response->getBody());
        if ($phpNative['errorCode']==0) {
            return $phpNative['results'][$url]['shortUrl'];
        }
    }
    return "";
}
?>

As I said - it’s simple. There’s a lot more to do with it, but it serves the purpose I needed it for and I think it might be useful for others who only want to shorten some urls. If you need more than that, you might want to take a look at the above mentioned project.

Arik

Lior Levin asked me today if it’s possible to create a Firefox extension, that will block Facebook part of the time. As a result, I created a Firefox extension (a compiled Greasemonkey) that blocks Facebook for 45 minutes each hour (form :16 to :59), i.e. blocking Facebook for 75% of your time.

This is a very rough alpha version. It will work, but it has a lot more to do with.

Will be glad to hear if you’re using it, and what you think of it.

Download extension | Download Greasemonkey Userscript

Arik

I really like avatars and therefore I’m a big fan of Gravatar. When Google first released their Contacts API, the first thing I though of was creating a small application to sync my friend’s Gravatars to my Google Contacts addressbook. The problem was that the first version of the API didn’t have an option to manage the photos of the contacts. Few months later, Google updated the API to include the option to update the contact’s photos. I played a bit with the new API, but never had the time to write the appliaction.

Yesterday  (October 11 2008), the guys from Automattic/Gravatar wrote a post the summarizes their last year. This reminded me of this small project that I always wanted to code. I’ve decidced to code a first release of the application and put the code on Google Code for other to contribute.

I’v decided to make it a .NET application and not a Python script, to address more people (I guess that more people are comfortable with running application than Python scripts). The reason that this isn’t a webapp, is because it takes a whole lot of time to process each contact list. If there was an option to question the Gravatar API for existence of a Gravatar for each email, it would make everything a bit quicker.

It’s .NET 2.0, so I guess there shouldn’t be a problem to run it on Linux using Mono, although I didn’t try that. The code is very simple, so if someone wants to translate it to other languages it’s possible and shouldn’t take too much time.

This is an alpha version, therefore don’t be scared if a nasty exception jumps at you There are a lot of things to imporve, like adding threads to speed up things, time left counter and more. When I will have some more free time, I might add all this.

This is my first opensource project and your comments are mostly appreciated. 

Arik

In case you didn’t know, Skype offers an extensive API for their application. This API can be used via Java library, COM module or a Python library. The Java library, COM Module and Python library all share similar features and I decided to try out the Python library. What I wanted to do is to write a simple Python script that uses the Skype API to send SMS message from Skype. After going through their API documention, I was ready to go and the outcome was this short script: 

I think that the code is pretty straightforward and doesn’t require additional explaining. Feel free to ask questions at the comments.
Arik