benrasmusen.com » PHP

FriendFeedback.com - Quickly get anonymous feedback from friends

Ben Rasmusen — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 23:44:51 +0000

I’m proud to announce the launch of FriendFeedback.com. A simple application that lets you quickly and easily get anonymous feedback from your friends. The idea is that if you want some feedback on something from your friends, they may not always be willing to give you an honest opinion to your face. This application lets them respond anonymously and hopefully truthfully.

It’s certainly not anything life changing, but it was a fun application to build and design (yikes! I said it! I design the site, so forgive me if it makes your eyes bleed). Let me know what you think and feel free to comment here or contact me if you have any bugs to report or any features to suggest.

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FTWeet.com - Your FTW vs FTL Ratio on Twitter

Ben Rasmusen — Thu, 29 May 2008 01:48:44 +0000

I just finished adding some final touches to a new app: ftweet.com. FTWeet.com is just a simple application that lets you see what your FTW (for the win) to FTL (for the loss) ratio is on twitter.com. I wanted to get a cumulative score of my overall emotional read based on how many times I used FTW and FTL (silly I know, but it was bored and it was quick to code). It’s not anything crazy but kind of neat to checkout. It uses the summize.com API and my good friend Ben Lew hooked up the sweet design.

My ratio can be found at ftweet.com/benrasmusen.

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CheckYesOrNo.info - Quick yes or no polls

Ben Rasmusen — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:20:33 +0000

Gordon Brander and I have launched another side project: CheckYesOrNo.info. It’s a super simple site that allows you to ask quick yes or no questions. It’s like those notes you used to get from girls back in Junior High. Jump right in and check it out by answering this question: http://checkyesorno.info/5.

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Townsquare.biz - the easiest way to get your business online

Ben Rasmusen — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:27:08 +0000

Gordon Brander and I are proud to announce the Beta launch of a new web application we’ve been working on for the last couple of months, Townsquare.biz. Townsquare allows businesses to create an online presence quickly and easily. The idea behind it is that there are a lot of small businesses that would like to have an online presence but don’t want to spend a lot of money or time having a website built. Townsquare gives them a clean semantic website with a very simple interface, so business owners can quickly get their business online as well as keep it up to date.

Here is a couple of the features currently available:

Complete control over the look and feel of the site via CSS
Add/Edit/Delete web pages
A blog, which can be used for project announcements or news
Embedded maps on the page
Clean, semantic, micro formatted code to aid in SEO.

Head on over and check it out and let me know what you think. All suggestions, questions and feedback are welcome. To view a sample page head to townsquare.biz/benrasmusen.

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Craigslist.org OPML Exporter

Ben Rasmusen — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:25:20 +0000

When I first started freelancing I was looking for a way to get an RSS feed of all the computer gigs on craigslist.org for every city in the USA. Since most of these postings were telecommunting position it didn’t matter what city they were posted in. But grabbing the feed manually from 300+ cities on craigslist was clearly not the best option. To solve this need I have written a quick script that loops through all the craigslist.org cities of your choosing and grabs the RSS feed for the query of your choice. This allows you to search for anything, not just computer gigs.

I hereby present: Craigslist.org OPML Exporter

Hopefully some of you will find this useful. Please don’t hesitate to contact me with questions or suggestions.

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Find and Replace Regular Expression

Ben Rasmusen — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:33:04 +0000

I find myself creating a fair amount of forms for websites. I normally want to grab the $_POST variables and assign them to local variables. I found a relatively easy way to do this using the power of TextMates Regular Expression Search and Replace. Once the form is created I submit it, dump the $_POST array between some ‘pre’ tags and grab the output. Paste the output into your file and do the following search and replace. Don’t forget to check the ‘Regular Expressions’ box.

In the ‘Find’ Box:
\[(.?*)\] => (.?*)

In the ‘Replace’ Box:
\$$1 = $_POST['$1'];

Turn this:
[field_1] => asdfa [field_2] => sdfas [field_3] => dfasd [field_4] => fasdfasf

Into this:
$field_1 = $_POST['field_1']; $field_2 = $_POST['field_2']; $field_3 = $_POST['field_3']; $field_4 = $_POST['field_4'];

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Dynamic Joomla! Content Pages

Ben Rasmusen — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:30:28 +0000

Joomla! is a good CMS as far as CMS’s go, but as with any piece of software, it has it’s limitations. Of course it can’t be all things to all people, but it does a fairly good job.

Recently I was looking to create some content pages using Joomla!’s article setup. The idea was to create ‘articles’ about certain products to be used for landing pages. These pages would have product specific information which was already contained in the Virtuemart database. I thought it relatively silly and un-DRY to have to recreate the content in this new page when it already existed in another part of the site. Not to mention the hassle of having to make sure the two remained consistent (such as prices or product names).

Normally I would just write some PHP/MySQL to handle this but of course that isn’t allowed natively within a Joomla! article and for good reason. Fortunately I found two Joomla! Extensions that do the trick nicely.

RunPHP

This allows you to write PHP right in the article by wrapping it in {runphp}{/runphp} tags. This is super handy and works great. I’m able to pull data from my Virtuemart database and drop it right into the article, as well as have more conditional control over different aspects of the article content.

MosSnippet

This Mambot is neat because it allows you to use multiple languages and markups with standard syntax (as opposed to RunPHP which obviously only works with PHP).Â Â The only drawback is that you have to pre-write these snippets in the administrative side of this Mambot before you can use them in your article.Â So you write your code and save it as a snippet in the Mambot (you have 15 slots available by default) and then you can call it in your article by using {snippet name} replacing ‘name’ with the actual name of your snippet.Â This works well if you have a snippet of code you use repeatedly (such as dynamic tracking code perhaps?) and is nice because you can use multiple programming languages.