Tag Archives: World Wide Web

Read Remote File Content-Type with Zend_Http_Client

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Check an Image on a Remote Server

This is a common task. You’d like to know whether the image on the remote server exists. Zend Framework gives the answer of this question and in particular this can be completed with Zend_Http_Client.

Content-Type and Content-Length

The little problem is that checking for content-type is not always correct, because it will return an image content type even when the image does not exists, so it’s better to check for content-length.

Code

The simple way to check this is like that:

$client = new Zend_Http_Client('http://remote-machine/image.jpg');
$response = $client->request('head');
if ( NULL == $response->getHeader('Content-Length') )
    // do whatever if the image does not exists.

In fact here, in this example I don’t check for GET request, because is way to slow than the HEAD method, but you should be aware of incorrect responses when using HEAD. In fact if you request the HEAD of a FLV video it will be returned text content-type, while using GET everything’s working fine but slow though.

Retrieving YouTube Channel’s Videos with Zend_Gdata_YouTube

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Zend_Gdata

Zend Framework gives you the possibility to interact with Gdata services, which are provided by most of the Goolge services. You can find more on the docs page of Zend_Gdata. The basic principle is that you can connect a service with you API key, given by Google. What I’m about to show you is how do connect such a service.

In theory Zend_Gdata depends on Zend_Http_Client and you’ve to connect it with an instance of this class.

// 1. setup API key
$apiKey = 'your_api_key_here';
 
// 2. retrieve videos via GData Atom
$client = new Zend_Http_Client();
$gdata = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube(null, 'my-app', null, $apiKey);

Note that you’ve to replace your API key in the chunk above.

Now once that you’ve connected the YouTube service you can iterate through the entries from the video feed.

$videoFeed = $gdata->getUserUploads('username');
foreach ($videoFeed as $entry) {
    echo $entry->getTitle();
}

The thing is that you can modify a bit the code above. As ZF docs says if you don’t setup a Zend_Http_Client a default with default configuration, so you can omit this and simple write:

// 1. setup API key
$apiKey = 'your_api_key_here';
 
// 2. retrieve videos via GData Atom
$gdata = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube(null, 'my-app', null, $apiKey);

Change the Viewport, be Ready for the iPhone!

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Sites for mobile

Have you ever noticed that once you start designing a site for mobile, as iPhone and Nexus One from Google are, the site is looking really ugly! These two devices in particular, as may other using Opera Mini for instance, scale the site, because only than you can view the entire layout and than zoom to a particular part of the page.

This is nice because news sites as cnn.com or lemonde.fr are full of text & image information and once zoomed in they fit the screen – very nice feature of the browsers. However if you’d like to design a site for mobile the bad part comes here. Yeah you know how to detect the browser, that was a topic of one of my previous posts, but even than you fully functional, but less decorated site is scaled again and looks more ugly than the full version of the site.

Twitter for mobile

How to make a site visible in mobile …

Look at the http://mobile.twitter.com – the problem is that if you open this link with a normal browser, not from mobile, you’ll get redirected to the twitter.com and you cannot see the difference.

You can see how it’s made on …

The digg’s mobile version. Look at http://m.digg.com. This time you can see the different approach just by looking at the source code. Pay attention to meta tag in the head – it simply says – “don’t scale”. Nice thing to notice!

Don’t scale my site anymore:

<html>
 <head>
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;"/>
 </head>
...
</html>

jQuery tips – storing data

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Storing data?

I was reading an article where the author says it is not a good practice to store data in the DOM. Indeed this is a bad practice and you should avoid it. After that he gives an example with using the DOM with the ALT attribute:

$('selector').attr('alt', 'data being stored');
// later the data can be retrieved using:
$('selector').attr('alt');

and after that the more clean:

$('selector').data('paramtername', 'data being stored');
// then later getting the data with
$('selector').data('paramtername');

OK, is more clean. But however it is bad practice to use such a “heavy” construction to store local data. It is obvious you can prefer to store it in a local variable. Thus you avoid the extra performance.

Cross-browser rounded corners! Works on IE but, but not on Opera!

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What’s this that works on IE and any other browser, except on Opera?!

Rounded Corners

That was a strange answer. Who’s making rounded corners with CSS?! on IE and more important how? There is a way to make it, but not entirely with CSS and HTML. The solution is with VML a subset of XML to deal with vectors, and CSS of course.

The original solution I found on snook.ca.

It is really working fine as described and shown in the example, but there are some issues as well. There is no way to setup background image on the container, and the width and height are behaving strange.

However this gives you an opportunity to make cross browser rounded corners with no scripting that slows down the page and except Opera it’s quite working!