Updated Random String generator CakePHP component

In: Tutorials

20 Oct 2009

Here is a new component that will generate random strings for you. You can pass it a set of characters to pick from and how long your random string should be. I use it to generate passwords but you can do just about anything with it.

To use it, create a file called random_helper.php in app/controllers/components and copy the following code.

<?php
class RandomHelperComponent extends Object {
 
/**
 * Random string generator function
 *
 * This function will randomly generate a password from a given set of characters
 *
 * @param int = 8, length of the password you want to generate
 * @param string = 0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz all possible values
 * @return string, the password
 */     
	function generateRandomString ($length = 8, $possible = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz') {
		// initialize variables
		$password = "";
		$i = 0;
 
		// add random characters to $password until $length is reached
		while ($i < $length) {
			// pick a random character from the possible ones
			$char = substr($possible, mt_rand(0, strlen($possible)-1), 1);
 
			// we don't want this character if it's already in the password
			if (!strstr($password, $char)) { 
				$password .= $char;
				$i++;
			}
		}
		return $password;
	}
}
?>

make sure you include it in the appcontroller as such

var $components = array('Auth','Email','RandomHelper');

then you can call it as follows in any function

$password= $this->RandomHelper->generateRandomString(4,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz');

Enjoy!

Living on the point

In: News and Updates

20 Oct 2009

We all heard of the term living on the edge before right?
Here is a definition of what this means from the urbandictionary

Living on the edge

Living on the edge means living a dangerous and/or unusual everyday life. People who live on the edge are very frequently exposed to phisical, psycological, economical, lawful or other kinds of dangers.

Examples for people who live on the edge:
Extreme-sportsmen, gamblers, policemen, thiefs, human-rights-activists, rappers, etc.
-My friend John is living on the edge.
-Oh yeah? He is a gambler or something?
-No, he cleans windows of high office buildings.

Today, I am officially coining a new term called “living on the point” … see when you live on the edge, you got an infinite amount of points to live on. All the sudden you realize that the edge is not as extreme as you may have thought before.

This is where the point comes in. When you live on the point that’s all you got. One single point, making this life style the most extreme. A definition for such life style may sound something like the following. Perhaps this will be on the urban dictionary soon.

Living on the point

Living on the point means living a life more dangerous and/or unusual than you can humanly understand. People who live on the point are in constant extreme phisical, psycological, economical, lawful or other kinds of dangers.

Examples for people who live on the point:
Extreme-extreme-sportsmen, gamblers (playing poker in tank full of sharks), policemen (performing riot control on tigers), thiefs (stealing unstable dynamite), etc.
-My friend John is living on the point.
-Oh yeah? He is a gambler or something?
-No, he jumps off of high office buildings with nothing but a small zip-lock bag and dental floss.

New Bit.ly Class to use with CakePHP or by it self

In: Tutorials

6 Aug 2009

If you use service like Twitter where you only get a limited number of characters to post or if you are just sick of dealing with unruly long urls you might be familliar with url shortening services such as Bit.ly.

I personally like them because of they offer a nice API and statistics all for free. It is a pretty quick service too. You can generate hundreds of URLs in just a few seconds. All you have to do is register and you get a username and API key which you will need in the following section.

Here is the code … As you can see I only implemented the shorten for now but I will probably add some of the other stuff later. For some reason WP won’t let me post curl_exec( so be sure to remove the extra character.

class bitly {
	/**
	 * A PHP class to utilize the bitly API
	 * through the Bitly API. Handles:
	 * - Shorten
	 *
	 * Requires PHP5, CURL, JSON and a Bitly account http://bit.ly/
	 *
	 * Bitly API documentation: http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation
	 */
 
	protected $appkey;
	protected $login;
	protected $version;
 
	/**
	* Contruct the Bitly Class
	*
    * @param string, your Bitly account key
    * @param string, your Bitly account login
	*/
	public function __construct($login, $appkey, $version='2.0.1') {
		$this-&gt;login = $login;
		$this-&gt;appkey = $appkey;
		$this-&gt;version = $version;
	}
 
	/**
	* Retrieve a shortened URL
	*
    * @param string, url to shorten
    * @param string, version of Bitly to use
	*/
	public function shorten($url) {
		//create the URL
		$api_url = 'http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version='.$this-&gt;version.'&amp;longUrl='.urlencode($url).'&amp;format=xml&amp;login='.$this-&gt;login.'&amp;apiKey='.$this-&gt;appkey;
		//call the API
		$curl = curl_init();
		curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $api_url);
		curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
		$response = curl_ex_ec($curl);
		curl_close($curl);
 
		//parse the XML response and return the url
		$xml_object = new SimpleXMLElement($response);
		return $xml_object-&gt;results-&gt;nodeKeyVal-&gt;shortUrl;
	}
 
}

If you want to use this in CakePHP … you will want to do something like this.
Put this line before the class … I actually use this in a helper since this is a view level class

App::import('Vendor','Bitly', array("file" =&gt; "bitly/bitly.class.php"));

Now you can just invoke it in one of your functions somewhere with two simple calls!

$bitly = new Bitly('username', 'your_API_key_here');
$short_url = $bitly-&gt;shorten($long_url);

Simple as that … oh and one more thing. Be sure to have CURL installed else this won’t work.

How to use your social network to make money

In: News and Updates| Tutorials

29 Jul 2009

Are you a frequent user of social networking websites such as MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, Bebo and many more? Wondering how to turn your social media followers int some cash? Try using a service such as Reward Champ!

http://www.rewardchamp.com

Reward Champ offers an easy way for you to turn your social network into a cash network with just a few clicks. You can use your social influence to your advantage and promote products and services that your followers might find useful. They have a large set of social publishing features on all offers so you can reach your friends on all major social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, etc. You will be credited for each offer they complete with points you can use for cash payments or gift certificates. By using your social network you can make hundreds of dollars, or even thousands each month and significantly boost to your monthly budget with just a few clicks a day. Making money from home made easy through social networking, and social media marketing.

Registration is free and you also get to compete for a weekly cash drawing on top of all the points you earn already. What do you have to loose?! Try social media marketing.

How to use MagpieRSS with CakePHP

In: Tutorials

23 Jul 2009

MagpieRSS is a PHP based RSS parser that can be downloaded here http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/

What good is it you ask? You can use it to pull in information from any RSS feed and do what ever you want with the data. For example I use it to pull the RSS feed from my blog and display links to my latest posts on http://www.rewardchamp.com You can see it on the bottom of the page.

CakePHP makes this way to easy! First you need to download the MagpieRSS files from the link above and then extract to your vendors folder.

You need to put this line at the very top of your controller file you want to use RSS with. Before the class declaration

App::import('Vendor','Snoopy', array("file" =&gt; "magpierss/extlib/Snoopy.class.inc"));

Now inside a function you want create a new Snoopy object. I use Snoopy because I’m lazy … MagpieRSS is not constructed as Classes like CakePHP would like it to be … Snoopy is. Snoopy will return XML for you which you can make into an easily usable object with SimpleXMLElement. You can var_dump to see what exactly is in this object. You can figure out what to do from there.

$snoopy = new Snoopy();
$snoopy->fetch('http://www.solitechgmbh.com/your/feed/here');
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($snoopy->results);
return $xml->channel->item;

Something like this will get you the title for example.

echo $item->title;

Happy coding!

I Am Rich – Faceook and MySpace Application

In: Social Application| Website Portfolio

31 Mar 2009

I am happy to announce our latest application for MySpace and Facebook called I Am Rich!

MySpace Version: I Am Rich MySpace
Facebook Version: I Am Rich Facebook

Rules of the game
Tip: Please feel free to click here and use our forums if you have suggestions for new items or any other ideas to improve the game

Live like the top 1% and flaunt your money! Start with $1,000,000 and build a huge bank account. The money just rolls in and all you have to worry about is figuring out how to spend it. Buy anything you want and impress your friends with your deep pockets.

You will earn $10,000 an hour by your self and can hire people to make you even more money! To hire someone, just send them an app invitation and watch your earnings grow. If they accept they will become your employee and start making you an extra $10,000 an hour. You can have as many employees as you want. You can all get rich together.

As your wealth grows you unlock more and more items to buy such as cars, houses, jewelry, art, mansions, private islands, celebrities, buildings, famous monuments, ships, and much much more!

You can also sell your items. Item prices fluctuate based on how many people are buying them or selling them. You can make a lot of money by buying low and selling high but be careful, sometime prices might drop dramatically due to unforeseen circumstances. Get your friends to help you inflate the prices and become rich together!

You also get Influence Points for completing Offers on the Get More Cash page. These influence points can be used to drive the price of an item up 5%. So if you are heavily invested in a particular item, you can use your influence to drive up your profits. Just click the info link on any item to use your influence.

Impress your friends with extravagant gifts. Who can refuse a 10 Karat ring or a brand new Ferrari?! You will be able to use them as a tax write off and get 50% you spent back to buy even more stuff.

Your wealth will also be displayed on your profile for everyone to see along with all the things you own. Impress your friends and everyone else with all your cool items.

Live big and flaunt your money! After all, YOU ARE RICH!

Announcing RewardChamp 2.0

In: Website Portfolio

21 Feb 2009

We are pleased to announce the new design and direction of RewardChamp. After several months in the works, we have released a brand new look for the website using the latest web technologies. Our interfaces are even easier to use now and we added more services. In this tough economy everybody can use some extra cash.

You can still complete offers and earn money, or you can share the offers your friends might be interested in with your social network and make even more money. Each one of our offers now features a variety of one click links which you can use to share with your friends. Our offers range anywhere from shopping discounts, free trial offers, surveys, articles, pay per click websites and much much more. Making money online has never been this easy.

All the points you earn will be added up each week and the one with the highest points earns an extra cash bonus. This bonus is the cash pool shown on the front page which grows each time someone makes money on the site. The more people participate the more is up for grabs each week.

Forumvirus.com – SOLD

In: Consulting Projects| News and Updates

6 Feb 2009

I am happy to announce that Forumvirus.com is no longer in our portfolio. It has found a new home with a web savvy investor. It has been a fun little project and I am happy it found a good new home.

http://www.forumvirus.com

We acquired Forumvirus.com about three years ago for $500.00 USD through an online auction site. It was an easy transfer, there wasn’t much to the website at the time. The transaction was completed quickly and we were excited to get workgin on the project.

We were looking to getting into the website flipping business and though jumping head first would be the best approach at the time. The market was hot and we didn’t want to miss out on it. In hind site, I think we paid too much for the website since there was little to no income that wasn’t due to the advertisement that the previous owner was running and there was no organic traffic. The design of the website needed some definite work also.

If you are looking for a good project, those flaws are actually exactly what you would looking for to buy. You want to have identified the flaws and have a strategy to fix them before you buy else your investment will most likely not be worth it in the end.

We have done a lot of SEO work on the site and over time we got into the top five position for forum directory related searches on Google. We have not done any advertisement short of some link building in the beginning. When we sold the site, all traffic was organic which is worth a lot since it is continuous and free. We have also updated the look of the website and made it more appealing and easier to use for visitors and forum owners looking to advertise.

Over all, it has been a fun project and it was fun to see it grow into a recognizned name on teh internet when it came to forum directories. I am happy it has found a good new home.

DuelingNinjas – Online Ninjas Social Game

In: Social Application| Website Portfolio

12 Oct 2008

Welcome to DuelingNinjas.com, the social networking site dedicated to ninjas and cool people in general! By joining our fast growing community of ninjas you will be able to meet other ninjas from around the world and do what ninjas do best, fight! While dueling you will gain experience points over time which can be used to learn more moves to make your ninja more powerful. Let the dueling of the ninjas begin!

http:///www.duelingninjas.com

DuelingNinjas is a massively multiplayer online role playing game for people who like ninjas. We wanted to build a website that is a fun community based around a game. The game is simple yet addicting and it offers a fun interactive way to meet people and take social networking to a different level. In this online social game you are able to create a ninja representation of yourself and meet other ninjas from around the world. It aims to bring like minded, ninja loving people together and to do what ninjas do best. Fight!

DuelingNinjas was created because of the need for a simple, and fun free online ninja game. The rules are easy and the general idea is to just have fun and waste some time. This free ninja fighting game is meant for people of all ages and all nationalities. It is meant to be a place where ninjas can come together and meet other people who are enthusiastic about ninjas. It is not meant to compete with other social networking sites, it is meant to be a game with some social features.

This is our experimental site for breaking into the social networking scene.  We will see what it takes to promote this site and what it takes to make the site popular enough to promote it self. We will be starting off with out standard promotion strategies and will move on from there as necessary. We will be posting updates on the project as needed. We hope this will be a good learning experience for us and others who are interested in getting a website / online business started.

Screen Shot:

SoliTech website Re-Design

In: News and Updates| Website Portfolio

26 Sep 2008

It has been a few years since we designed our first website for SoliTech and it has served us well. At the time, we were looking fro a sleek, clean design that we used to create an online presence with. It listed our services, current portfolio, gave our customers a way to contact us. It also had some entry ages to some of our services.

As time went on, we got pore web development and information technology consulting projects which was great for business but they never made it onto our website or they just did not get the exposure they deserved do to the static orientation of the website.

In today’s world, information is key and the web is a great way t distribute information. Our new websit would focus on just that. We chose to use somethign that looked more like an online blog then or static site. We want to open up channels of communication with our customers and potential customers. We want to offer new way of learning about our company and wha we are all about.

We present you the new SoliTech GmbH website which promises more insight into the company and opens up new way of communication and customer feedback. Please explore our website and leave us comments on what you think.

Old website screen shots:


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