random($code) - Example

DropCash PHP Output

lhl — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 22:27:14 -0700

I started my first Dropcash campaign today. and coded up a large custom "badge" for my campaign with a little bit of PHP glue.

If you're using PHP5 you'll probably want to use SimpleXML, which looks totally rockin', but for us less adventurous shlubs, give PEAR::XML_Serializer an install (you might need to -f for since it's still 'beta') and check this out:

<?php
  // Caching
  $cache = '/tmp/dropcash';
  $agelimit = 5 * 60; // 5 minutes
  $timestamp = @filemtime($cachefile);
  $age = time() - $timestamp;

  if($age > $agelimit || $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] == 'update') {
    $f = fopen($cache, 'w');
    fwrite($f, file_get_contents('http://www.dropcash.com/campaign/[user]/[campaign_name]/xml'));
  }

  $xml = file_get_contents($cache);

  require_once 'XML/Unserializer.php';
  $u = &new XML_Unserializer();
  $u->unserialize($xml);
  $dc = $u->getUnserializedData();

  $percent = $dc['percentage'];
  $percentpx = floor($percent * 4); // 400px bar
  $goal =  $dc['goal'];
  $collected = $dc['total_collected'];
?>

This will probably make more sense w/ the rest of the badge code since it's a bit style-based (for the percentpx).

Self-Updating Web Software

lhl — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 09:15:10 -0700

Anil announced the recent release of MT 3.12, which has, among other things, automatic generation of .htaccess files for dynamic pages.

One of the great things about Drupal is its integrated URL handling, so that's definitely part of the way to go. Apache, or 'full system' integration is certainly a big step for web software to take. Of course, there are those pesky permissions problems and securities risks...

Here's a little bit I wrote a while back for a file that's in a public folder listing (labeled '!!!_donotclick_youwillbebanned.foo' and w/ a robots.txt Deny rule) to block aggressive spiders:

Weighted Round-Robin Redirection

lhl — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 02:15:40 -0700

Here's a quick and dirty way to do weighted round-robin redirection. I assign the key rather than the entire array for weighted array creation so it's not the most inefficient way to do it ever (a more efficient way is to call rand(1,100) and then have a big switch, but it's a PITA to shuffle, especially as you add more sites).

Anyway, the following example shows 50% of the traffic going to url-3, 37.5% to url-2, and 12.5% to url-1: