It was then decided to try and improve this by making the script only login once and save the session, so that subsequent calls would not have to login each time. This is one of the solutions we came up with ( because finding this online was not very easy )

The first step is the login, the agent variable is being set to trick the API into thinking that the request has come from a browser.

//Set the cookie file name
$cookiefile = tempnam("/tmp", "cookies");
$agent     = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)";
//Set the user name and password values
$USER      = 'user';
$PASS      = 'pass';
//The API url, to do the login
$url = "https://www.example.com/";

//Initialise CURL
$ch = curl_init();
//Set all the various options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $agent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 0); // set POST method
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
//Set the cookie file you want to use
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookiefile);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookiefile);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $USER.":".$PASS);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);

//execute the CURL
$mRes = curl_exec($ch);

Remember not to close curl at this point. Now we look at the loop that will carry out the 60,000 calls to the API

while ($row = [get row value for the 60,000 entries])
{
    $url       = "https://www.example.com/API?check=$row";
    //We do not have to initialise CURL again
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $agent);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 0); // set POST method
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
    //Remember to use the same cookiefile as above
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookiefile);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookiefile);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 2);
    //execute the CURL call
    $mRes = curl_exec($ch);
    //DEAL WITH THE RESULT FROM THE CURL CALL
}
//only close CURL once the work is finished.
curl_close($ch);

If you’d like to know more the various CURL options I have used above like ‘CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST’ etc, have a read through the curl_setopt page on php.net. You can also read more about CURL there as well.

A Lolcat, or LOLCAT, is an image combining a photograph, most frequently a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often) broken English—a dialect which is known as “Kitty Pidgin”,[1] “lolspeak”, or Lolcat.

Lolcat or Kitty Pidgin has been around for a while now, and has been made popular by sites like I Can Has Cheezburger?…however in spite of its popularity, to find a programming language based on Kitty Pidgin still came as a real surprise to me.

Lolcode, created on 25 May 2007, is a programming language created by Adam Lindsay based on lolcat.
The language is still fairly young and at the moment has the following subset of keywords

• btw
• byes
• can-has
• diaf
• gimmeh
• gtfo
• hai
• i-has-a
• im-in-yr
• im-outta-yr
• in-mah
• iz
• kthx
• kthxbye
• lol-r
• operators
• visible

Writing a program in lolcode seems surprisingly easy for people who understand lolcat, the main thing to remember is that HAI is used at the start of a program and KTHXBYE ends the program.
The default hello world program is as simple as

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

The language also contains error handling using AWSUM THX on success and O NOES which is the exception block!
The reason you probably haven’t yet seen a whole slew of lolcode applications yet, is that the language is still being defined with respect to operator priorities and correct syntax. Some compilers, however, already exist, like this one in python.

For the time being, this is another addition to my ‘must try at least once’ list…KTHXBYE!

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

Now Gravatars have actually been around for a while, but they have been gaining in popularity expecially since Automattic recently acquired gravatar and WordPress 2.5 released with inbuilt support.
Adding Gravatars to your wordpress theme is fairly easy, all it requires is calling the new get_avatar() function in your comment template php file

<?php
   echo get_avatar( $comment, $size = '96', $default = '<path_to_url>' );
 ?>

where $comment is the authors id and is a required field, $size controls the size of the avatar and $default is the path to your default image.
Now, whenever someone makes a comment on your site, if they have a predefined gravatar, it will show up otherwise your default image will appear.
Initially my default avatar looked something like this

However while reading the gravatar blog recently, I came across this article, which talks about gravatar’s new support for Identicons, MonsterID, and Wavatars.
In a nut shell what these projects try to do is uniquely identify users, using information like IP addresses so that they can generate random images which are then unique to that user, so that whenever they leave a comment on your blog, instead of being presented with the default image they are also treated as part of the ‘family’

This led me to play with the $default value in the get_avatars() function and I came across an undocumented feature, if I change the value of $default, my gravatar changes as well!
If you try any of the following,

echo get_avatar( $comment, $size = '96', $default = 'wavatar' );
OR
echo get_avatar( $comment, $size = '96', $default = 'monsterid' );
OR
echo get_avatar( $comment, $size = '96', $default = 'identicon' );

you can automatically see the changes to the default gravatars, which is pretty cool (at least in my opinion)
So now I can get unique avatars for each commenter (who are not already using gravatar)



NOTE: At the moment for some reason only wavatar seems to be working, the others are throwing ’504 Gateway Time-out’ errors The others seem to be back up now.

ALTER TABLE <TABLE_NAME> max_rows = 200000000000 avg_row_length = 50;

(Just note, that there will still be a limit when this is done, but this definitely buys you a lot more time )
Have a read through the blog post, there are some other useful tips, like making this change while creating the table if you know you will be dealing with large amounts of data….or use InnoDB tables instead

Here is what I did to create my print stylesheet
I started by creating a blank css file called ‘print.css’ and uploaded it to my site, I then added the following line in the header file of my wordpress template

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.SITENAME.com/blog/PATH-TO-FILE/print.css" type="text/css" media="print" />

I also changed the call to my default stylesheet from

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.SITENAME.com/blog/PATH-TO-FILE/style.css" type="text/css" />
to
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.SITENAME.com/blog/PATH-TO-FILE/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

(i.e. I added media=”screen”, this removes the default stylesheet from the page when printing)

Thats the easy part now taken care of
(A little tip, if you upload your print.css file to the same place your template’s default css file is, you will be able to edit it via your wordpress admin interface)

Once the file is in place, I looked at what had been printed and identified all the information that while useful online was not required on paper(marked in red in the image). For example, The entire menu, the social network links, the category posted to information, the sidebar and the page footer. I looked into the source code of the page and found the ids and classes that were wrapped around these site elements and entered them into the stylesheet with a ‘display:none;’
This is what the stylesheet starts out with, I want to define the sizes of my logo, tagline, content, and h1′s etc

/*Make sure that the background will remain white*/
body {
   background: white;
   font-size: 12pt;
}
/*Remove the unwanted categories from displaying*/
#header-links, #sidebar, #nav-wrap, .sociable, #respond, #commentform, #footer-wrap, .post-footer {
   display: none;
}
/*Set the font size for the H1s on the page*/
h1 {
   font-size: 14pt;
}
/*Set the font size for the logo "Scattered Thoughts"*/
#logo-text {
   font-size: 20pt;
   text-decoration: none !important;
}
/*Set the font size for the tag line "where good ideas go to die"*/
h2#slogan {
   font-size: 10pt;
}

Now all this is pretty good and gives me a fairly plain page when I go to print, but there are still a few things I want to change.
I want the post content to be shifted slightly to the right. My post content is located in a div with the class ‘entry’, so I add the following lines to my stylesheet

div.entry {
   margin-left: 5%;
   padding-top: 1em;
   border-top: 1px solid #999;
}

This pretty much looks exactly like what I want to see when I print the page, except for one last important (to me) thing.
When I add links in a post and I print the page out, those links get lost, because there is no way for me to see which page I was linking to on the piece of paper.
Once again CSS comes to the rescue, using css pseudo-elements I am able to add the physical link address onto the printed page, without actually making any changes to my template, or my posts!

a:link:after, a:visited:after {
   content: " (" attr(href) ") ";
}

Now this will add the physical url in brackets right after the link on the page. This works great, but the links appear this way in the entire printout. Since I do not want all the links on my page appearing with their physical address, I change this CSS slightly to only work for the content within the ‘entry’ class

.entry a:link:after, .entry a:visited:after {
   content: " (" attr(href) ") ";
}

This is what the css sheet looks like after everything

/*Make sure that the background will remain white*/
body {
   background: white;
   font-size: 12pt;
}
/*Remove the unwanted categories from displaying*/
#header-links, #sidebar, #nav-wrap, .sociable, #respond, #commentform, #footer-wrap, .post-footer {
   display: none;
}
/*Set the font size for the H1s on the page*/
h1 {
   font-size: 14pt;
}
/*Set the font size for the logo "Scattered Thoughts"*/
#logo-text {
   font-size: 20pt;
   text-decoration: none !important;
}
/*Set the font size for the slogan "where good ideas go to die"*/
h2#slogan {
   font-size: 10pt;
}
/*Shift the content a little to the right*/
div.entry {
   margin-left: 5%;
   padding-top: 1em;
   border-top: 1px solid #999;
}
/*To display code on the page*/
code{
  display: block;
  padding: 20px;
  text-align: left;
  overflow: auto;
  font-size: 10pt;
}
/*To add the physical link on the page*/
.entry a:link:after, .entry a:visited:after {
   content: " (" attr(href) ") ";
}

There are still further useful additions one can make to this code, like expanding abbreviations, writing the physical link as a footnote instead of in brackets etc. I am still working on a couple more changes that I intend to post in the near future. Let me know how these changes go on your site.
Here is what the page looks like now after the addition of the stylesheet

Suppose I wanted to advertise an email ‘kunaal@somedomain.com’, normally you would not put that on your website for fear of getting your email inbox choked with spam. Here is another little trick to hide your email address from everyone without a microformat reader.

Normally, you would write your email address using microformats as so – Kunaal Ramchandani can be contacted on kunaal@somedomain.com, which in the code would appear as

<span class="vcard"><span class="fn">Kunaal Ramchandani</span> can be contacted on <span class="email"><span class="value">kunaal@somedomain.com</span></span></span>

Now an ordinary scraper can easily pick up the email address mentioned in there, so to get around that we introduce random characters in between the email address, but put them outside the <span class=”value”> tags. What I mean is that I separate each character of the email address in a <span class=”value”> tag, and I write random letters in between each <span class=”value”> </span> pair, i.e for ‘kunaal’ I would convert it to

<span class="value">k</span>
<span class="value">u</span>
<span class="value">n</span>
<span class="value">a</span>
<span class="value">a</span>
<span class="value">a</span>
<span class="value">l</span>

and then introduce random characters like #,$,! random letters etc in between, making the final code look like

<span class="email"><span class="value">k</span>##<span class="value">u</span>!!<span class="value">n</span>@@<span class="value">a</span>$$<span class="value">a</span>%%<span class="value">l</span>^^<span class="value">@</span>**<span class="value">s</span>((<span class="value">o</span>))<span class="value">m</span>!!<span class="value">e</span>@@<span class="value">d</span>##<span class="value">o</span>$$<span class="value">m</span>%%<span class="value">a</span>^^<span class="value">i</span>**<span class="value">n</span>((<span class="value">. </span>))<span class="value">c</span>!!<span class="value">o</span>@@<span class="value">m</span>##</span></span>

On screen this would appear as k##u!!n@@a$$a%%l^^@**s((o))m!!e@@d##o$$m%%a^^i**n((. ))c!!o@@m##.

This would make it unreadable to your average person and your normal everyday address parser, and only visible to a microformat parser!

javascript:eval(567 * 234);

Now to create a bookmarklet, all you have to do is

1. Create a new bookmark
2. In the url field or the destination field, paste the javascript code you have written

You have now created a bookmarklet, that you can execute whenever you need it.

For example, to read the cookie contents of a site, you can put the following in the address bar

javascript:alert('Cookie date:\n' + document.cookie.replace(/; /g,'\n'));

or you can bookmark this link – View Cookies

Another simple bookmarklet to disable external style sheets is

Javascript:for ( ss=0; ss<document.styleSheets.length; ss++){void(document.styleSheets.item(ss).disabled=true);}

bookmarklet -> Disable Stlesheets

For those looking for more complex bookmarks, check out the following sites
Jesse’s Bookmarklet Site
Bookmarklet tool categories

• Using a FTP client, login to your server.
• Create a new directory in your public folder (www, public_html etc). Remember to keep the name something people will not be able to guess. something like “S3cr3tF0ld3r” maybe
• Create an empty .htaccess file and upload it to that directory
• The first and easiest step to carry out is to disable directory listings. Use the following code (also described here)

  Options All -Indexes

• Now comes the slightly trickier part, password protecting the directory:
  I first add the following lines to the .htaccess file
  

  AuthUserFile /path/to/.htpasswd
  AuthName "My own Login Area"
  AuthType Basic

• I then add the username and encrypted password to the .htpasswd file and place it in the same place mentioned in the htaccess above.
  The little script below generates the uname:password combination
  
  username:
  
  
  password:
  
  
• You can test this here, username and password are both ‘test’