I am on a huge Perl kick lately. I have been making tons of different perl scripts for many different uses. Some of them useful and some are just plain silly. In this post we are going to talk about making an easy script that will go out and check the pagerank of any site that you want. Then we will make the script run through PHP so we can display our result on a website. Read more »

After reading the chapter in my Perl book about regular expressions I decided to go ahead and solve one of the problems I usually have when getting cURL data.

Often times I had cURL report back the HTTP header with the XML data. Although I can disable this and tell cURL to only display the XML data, I wanted to be able to use the header data to distinguish if the website is reachable or not. This is especially useful for web apps that go down often like Twitter. Read more »

When programming in Perl or any language that requires you to run it from shell it is often helpful to have two screens open at once. One screen for your editor and one screen for running the program. This is how most IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) are structured; however, since I love Vim and the Linux command line I use a program called screen to make my own IDE type setup. Read more »

Sometimes it is helpful to know which ports are currently open on your server. On my FreeBSD servers I like to use the sockstat command. It is very similar to the netstat command for Windows or Linux. You can configure it to show IPv4 ports, IPv6 or both. Read more »

Now that you have MySQL installed you might want to install the famous Apache web browser on your FreeBSD system. This post will be a quick walk through for installing Apache with PHP5 with mostly default settings to help you get going quick. Read more »

I have had some serious issues integrating Twitter into my site using the javascript method. Firefox seems to load the twitter updates every time without a problem; however, Internet Explorer and Opera both have issues.

Opera for example will load the twitter updates on the first load of the page or if the twitter feed has been updated but will not load the second time the page is loaded. You can see this on a number of sites that use the javascript method of gathering twitter updates. Just go to their site and hit refresh and the twitter updates will disapear. Even sites that use twitterjs script from code.google.com don’t load properly after a refresh. Read more »

curl usage explained - I love curl!

Using cURL to interact with Google data services - A great resource from Google showing common usages of cURL interacting with their services. Read more »

Ever dream about automating mundane tasks? Or wish you could train you computer to do your work for you? I think we would all love to have the power of automation in our lives. With AutoIt we can easily take a boring repetitive task and automate it. AutoIt can send key strokes and mouse movements to your computer. But what makes AutoIt most useful is that it is actually a scripting language allowing If/then logic, flow control, variables and has support for PCRE (Pearl Compatible Regular Expressions). Once you create your script you can even compile it into a single .exe file. Read more »