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.

If you’re a web developer, you should really check out their Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet, which has some really great info on things developers should keep in mind when creating web sites.
The sheet covers various areas including

• Important SEO HTML Tags
• Search Engine Indexing Limits
• Recommended Title Tag Syntax
• Common Canonical Homepage Issue
• 301 Redirect for Apache – Probably one of the most important things to know (at least in my limited experience)
• Important Search Engine Robots
• Robots Meta Tag
• Common Robot Traps – Something to definitely be mindful of
• Robots.txt Syntax
• Sitemap Syntax

While there, also checkout

• Beginner’s Guide To SEO
• Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO

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.