Cjfay.com - Magic Designagina » Web Development

15 Web Resources You Should Know

chrisfay — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:43:25 +0000

Thank God for Google Reader and subsequently RSS for that matter. Sure, like probably most other’s my feed list is becoming a behemoth mess growing limbs and swiftly on its way to consuming the world with black hole’esk gravitational mass, but who cares? It’s my digital coffee in the morning and the red bull that fuels my late night spidering towards becoming a better designer and developer – for that I am grateful.

As most designers and developers can attest the list of resources we come across and attempt to stay current with can become quite lengthy. I wanted to take a moment and list a few of my staples when it comes to sites I visit on a regular basis and those I think help me stay on top of current trends and technologies from both a designer and developer perspective. These are sites that I feel should definitely be on your feed list. I won’t go into detail regarding what they are, but rest assured they’re worth checking out if not inviting them to dinner.

Envato Network

I know I wasn’t going to describe these links, but the Envato team has created one of the best networks around for anything web related. I spend a good deal of time scouring the forums, reading their blogs, or building themes for sale on Themeforest and you should too!

NETTUTS

Themeforest Blog

Noupe

Abduzeedo

Design You Trust

Smashing Magazine

BittBox

Design is Kinky

Freelance Switch

Just Creative Design

Read Write Web

Vandelay Design

Web Designer Wall

Cats Who Code

This list could go on and on, though I think this should get you started. Let us know what your favorites are!

AdRavage Overhauled

chrisfay — Wed, 13 May 2009 04:52:22 +0000

Just wanted to post an update regarding AdRavage as it has been a while since the last significant changes to the site aesthetically and/or functionally. The UI has been completely redesigned with hopes of making things easier to find, use, and just overall more intuitive. The last design was based on a template and figured it was about time I put together my own design for the site – hence the updates.

I also updated the codebase with some timezone fixes and things that were causing duplicate emails. If you still receive these it’s probably because I have your state’s/city’s timezone listed incorrectly in the database. Contact me if this is the case.

Let me know what you all think if you get a chance. And as usual, enjoy!

Parsing mal-formed rss feeds with Magpie RSS

chrisfay — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 01:03:08 +0000

I recently discovered that Craigslist’s rss feeds leave much to be desired in terms of well formed xml. A large portion of the AdRavage back-end magic works by parsing the rss results of searches, and the bulk of this is achieved through Magpie RSS. Unfortunately, when returned feeds contain invalid encoding or have structural issues they become virtually impossible to parse – at least by default.

Fortunately one of my users created a search that returned parsing errors of this nature and allowed me to dive into a solution to this problem. First of all, considering Craigslist will not be modifying the user input mechanism used to builds its feeds, and certainly will ignore my request for better formatting, i took it apon myself to do a little research. By submitting the feed for validation on http://validator.w3.org/feed I was able to get the exact issue causing the feed to break:

I couldn’t tell exactly what the issue was (aside from ‘not well-formed (invalid token)‘) until I pasted the contents into Notepad++, which displayed a strangely encoded character within the string. To fix the issue I needed to cleanse the extracted RSS feed just before it gets passed to PHP’s xml_parser, and after tracing the execution back I was able to pin-point it within rss_parse.inc right around line 130 or so.

$status = xml_parse( $this-&gt;parser, $source );

The contents of $source is the data within the rss feed and the point just before the parsing is conducted. The solution was simple – str_replace() the contents of $source before passing it to the parser.

function MagpieRSS ($source, $output_encoding='ISO-8859-1',
                        $input_encoding=null, $detect_encoding=true)
    {
		/*
		 * Feed cleansing (encoding replacement stuff) here CLF - 10/25/2008
		 * Should execute it on $source (the content extracted from feed)
		 */	
 
		 $source = str_replace('[bad data]','', $source);
 
		 /*
		  * END - feed cleansing
		  */
 
...

I wasn’t able to show the actual character I needed to replace, but you get the idea – replace [bad char] with the character(s) you want to remove before parsing. If you can’t seem to find it try pasting the section of bad data into Notepad++ and it will display it for you – notepad and wordpad will not. Invalid encoding/chars is only one way that feeds can be mal-formed, so if you run into other problems you would need to modify $source accordingly.

AdRavage.com – Ad search automation

chrisfay — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:01:01 +0000

AdRavage.com is released!

As some of you already know, I’ve been working on a site that lets you automate searching on websites such as Craigslist. I recently needed to purchase a vehicle and was repeatedly beaten to the punch by others who were able to monitor the ads much closer than I. AdRavage lets you create search terms, how often to search those terms, and ultimately sends out emails and/or text messages when matching results are found. The site is in beta as of now, and will soon feature other websites besides Craigslist.

Check it out! http://adravage.com