Tag Archives: Technology/Internet

How to Collect the Images and Meta Tags from a Webpage with PHP

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Meta Tags and the Facebook Example

You’ve definitely seen the “share a link” screen in Facebook. When you paste a link into the box (fig. 1) and press the “Attach” button you’ll get the prompted cite parsed with a title, description and possibly thumb (fig. 2). This functionality is well known in Facebook, but it appears to be well known also in various social services. In fact Linkedin, Reddit, Dzone‘s bookmarklet use it.

Facebook Attach a Link Prompt Screen
fig. 1 - Facebook Attach a Link Prompt Screen

Fist thing to notice is that this information, prompted by Facebook, is the same as the meta tag information. However there is a slight difference.

Facebook Attached Link Screen
fig. 2 - Facebook Attached Link Screen

Facebook prefers for the thumb the image set into the <meta property=”og:image” … />. In the case above this tag appears to be:

<meta property="og:image" content="http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/572/975/57297584_200.jpg" />

And the image pointed in the SRC attribute is exactly the same as the one prompted by Facebook (fig. 3).

Vimeo Thumb
fig. 3 - Vimeo Thumb

First thing to note is that the real thumb is bigger than the thumb shown in Facebook, so Facebook resizes it and the second thing to note is that there are more meta tags of the og:… format. Continue reading How to Collect the Images and Meta Tags from a Webpage with PHP →

Wanted – onfocus/onblur. Why They Don’t Work Always!

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On Focus

onfocus

Perhaps you think of onfocus and onblur events as a default behavior existing in any web page. This is not quite true! Onfocurs and onblur are well known in web developing (js) and are fired, of course, when the user tries to point something or leaves some element. Onfocurs is fired when the user either goes to an element with the Tab button on with the mouse. When the element is on focus, evidently, the onfocus event is fired. Actually you can see which element is on focus, like an anchor or input, when the element is outlined by the browser by default. In the same scenario, when some element has been on focus and than the user switches to another element, the onblur event is fired. Thus you may guess that this element is no longer on focus. Continue reading Wanted – onfocus/onblur. Why They Don’t Work Always! →

Reading GPS Latitude and Longitude from Image and Video Files

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The State of GPS Data from Mobile Devices

Most of the mobile devices today support GPS geo tagging. In fact most of them come bundled with navigation software that uses GPS and therefore all the pictures and (maybe) videos can be geo tagged. But as expected different vendors come with different support and formats.



iPhone OS comes with geotagging both on video and image files, while the latest Android and Symbian (the Nokia main OS for smartphones) can geo tag only images.

Even more – until recently Symbian didn’t support any geotagging before the installation of an additional software – such as Location Tagger . So generally the things are quite simple:

  1. iPhone OS geotags both video and image files;
  2. Android geotags only images;
  3. Symbian geotags only images – and on some devices this is possible only after installing a software;

This is in breve the state of mobile device geotagging! Continue reading Reading GPS Latitude and Longitude from Image and Video Files →

Few Thoughts on Web Video

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On Air


It’s really full of video sharing websites out there, but in fact almost all of them use Flash player to display their video files. This is the reality now, but with the coming of HTML5, perhaps the things are changing a bit!

First of all if you start dealing with video sharing platforms the first thing to do maybe is to find a good Flash (.flv) player and to convert all your video content in FLV.

Few things to know with Flash video players:

  1. The user can play those videos only after installing the Flash Plugin to his browser;
  2. The video must be encoded either in FLV (or FLash Video) or in MPEG-4 with h.264 codec. Only than the Flash player can play it;

The HTML5, which can be described as variety of new “things” in the HTML comes with a native <video> tag. Something like the <img> tag where you can just point the source of the image in the src attribute. Continue reading Few Thoughts on Web Video →

Google Analytics for Nokia … and Mobiles

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Is There an Analytics Interface for Mobile?

The last few months I was searching about some kind of mobile interface of Google Analytics for my Nokia e71. However I did not find one?! Please correct me if I’m wrong.

In the same time I knew there is a GA API, which is free to use, so finally I wrote a tiny web app allowing the reading of basic information about your Google Analytics accounts.

Note that your username and password are NOT SAVED! However it’s up to you to try.

An important note is that the API has a limitation in requests so yet again, it’s possible to be unavailable in case of too many requests.

Visit with Your Mobile Browser

this link:

http://www.stoimen.com/ga/

Note that I made it primary about my Nokia, so any screenshots will be welcomed as well.

It is still beta so be careful. In fact any suggestions are welcome. Either for improving the security and error handling as well as new data exports.

There are lots of things to be done, but this is really basic.