This article is here to help you get a jump start on using the UPS Shipping API. This article is part 1 of the series that will help you get all the required tools to get you up and running. Later the series will expand upon each service the API has to offer as well as go into detail on how to create your custom programs using various languages and show you examples with both PHP and Perl programming languages.
What is the UPS API?
The UPS API is a tool to allow you to communicate with the UPS servers using pretty much any programming language you want. This allows us to send our information, like addresses and weight and receive shipping rates and other information form UPS. UPS provides access to this API for free so developers can interact with their services to provide UPS information through their own custom apps. Whether it be through your web based ecommerce system to accurately determine shipping costs or display tracking information through your website. Read the rest of this entry »
Eric Wendelin over at eriwen.com was kind enough to let me post an article about Vim on his blog today. It is a nice guide to Vim for people that have never used Vim looking to add some productivity to their programing. If you have used Vim for years you might learn something as well.
While you are there check out some of his other articles. There are some great ones on grep, sed, awk, and lots more.
Vim is a beautiful tool
With my newly acquired Perl and regular expression skills I was trying to put them to the test and get a little practice. I asked a friend of mine if he had any regular expressions I should write. He first gave me an easy one. Replace ‘foo‘ with ‘bar‘ only when bar follows the word ‘blah‘. So after a minute or two I returned with a working regular expression.
Well that was easy…
Now for something a little trickier. He said, I want a regular expression that would print out words that land on every third letter ‘e‘ except if that word was ‘the‘. This doesn’t mean he wanted the third word that has the letter ‘e‘. Read the rest of this entry »
Google Chrome is the new browser that was just relased by Google in an attempt to capture the browser market to give them a significant advantage to their search/advertising business. With Chrome Google will be able to track what actions the browser takes to further narrow down pagerank of sites. Read the rest of this entry »
In response to David’s post on PHP IMDB Information Grabber, I thought I would extend his idea and grab the cover image for the movie and save it. Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t want to have to login to Twitter all the time to do updates. So what I made was a script that displays a small text box near my twitter updates on my blog when I am logged in. This is handy because not only does is display your tweets it also gives you an opportunity to update them while you are working on a blog post or just browsing around checking your own blog. Read the rest of this entry »
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 the rest of this entry »
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 the rest of this entry »