November 2013 – Andy's blog o' goodness

November 28, 2013

Tweeting on a button press with the Raspberry Pi

A while ago my door bell broke. So I did what any sensible person would; I decided that instead of buying a new one I would hook up an old bell I had to a Raspberry Pi and have the bell ring when someone pushed a button on my door. But then I though, “well, that’s a bit boring. My...

Code snippets/Gadgets/Raspberry Pi Comments: 0

November 27, 2013

Book review: Instant simple botting with PHP

I had the chance recently to read the book Instant Simple Botting with PHP, written by Shay Anderson and published by Packt Publishing. The book is designed to be a very quick and easy (hence the title!) introduction in to creating bots to scan web pages and collect information from them. The book seems squarely aimed at beginners in PHP...

General Comments: 0

November 18, 2013

Easy page scraping with Zend\Dom (from Zend Framework 2)

The other day I was interested in getting some information from the sussex.academia.edu site, specifically I wanted a list of tags for each of the faculty members. Now, this sounds relatively easy except when you consider that initial page contains a list of links to various schools/departments people have listed, and then under each of those pages you have different fieldsets...

Code snippets/PHP/Zend Framework Comment: 1

November 13, 2013

Zend Studio and SVN 1.8

I use SVN for most of my projects at work and have diligently kept it up-to-date with the latest versions of the work copies. What happens when the working copy structure changes, as it did from 1.7.x to 1.8.x, is that Zend Studio gives error messages about the SVN connector client not being compatible. Annoying! However, if like me you’ve...

General Comments: 0

November 4, 2013

Same height for elements

A while ago I wrote a jquery plug-in that allows you to easily make selected elements all the same height. Well, it turns out that it could be a little better because it didn’t take in to consideration margins, padding and such. So here’s a slightly more robust version.

javascript/jQuery Comments: 0

Monthly Archive: November, 2013

Tweeting on a button press with the Raspberry Pi

Book review: Instant simple botting with PHP

Easy page scraping with Zend\Dom (from Zend Framework 2)

Zend Studio and SVN 1.8

Same height for elements