This is just another portrait taken from my new EOS 1000D.

Armaghan Khan : Canon EOS 1000d test, originally uploaded by Fahd Murtaza.

Enhance your blog posts with Yahoo! Shortcuts.

If your content regularly mentions some companies regularly, Yahoo shortcuts can bring up latest financial information related to that company.

Relevant search results would also come up for certain terms like in the image shown UNIX Pipes would pop up a Yahoo shortcut with relevant contextual search results. Some bloggers may find some shortcuts annoying and irrelevant to their blogs content, but some might really find it useful. It all depends on what you blog about.

However the best feature I think is the auto detection of relevant images to your blog post. Images can really enlighten the posts and make them more interesting.

Yeah as always I am one complete day late to know about the new release of wordpress. Its really cool. I just downloaded and installed it. As its famous for its 5 minutes install; it has great new features and a neat and clean interface, I think a hundred times better than the previous version thats 2.3 if I am not wrong (2.3.3), yeah I just checked as I am writing this post on the old platform and I just needed to scroll down this post window (my wordpress blog is an auto install by Fantastico provided by my host in Cpanel)

Anyhow right now I am playing with the latest version (2.5) and its simply awesome.

See the difference. Its just obvious. Its on full page for this blog post.

The Old version of wordpress i.e. 2.3.3

The new cool thing wordpress i.e. 2.5

OK I usually work on the wordpress stuff and do all the fancy things with wordpress on these two Blogs of Josh Freedman

His press room at http://www.6seconds.org/press/
His blog is at http://6seconds.org/blog/

I spent my times for release and support my plugin. If you like my plugin and enjoy the support, do consider to make a donation to me. Thank you . I am available for hire too

You can view the plugin working at his press room at http://www.6seconds.org/press/

Its showing the 2 different categories’ recent posts. The number of the posts can be defined in the plugin’s only php file.

OK how to do such thing?

I am going to release a modified generic open source version if Josh allows me.

Update 1:33 AM : Yeah he allows me so here is the download material (on full post page)..

Downloads:

Version 0.5 (RAR): Click here to download .rar of WordPress Plugin: Get recent posts from two categories

Version 0.5 (RAR): Click here to download .zip of WordPress Plugin: Get recent posts from two categories

There are many ways for Extracting or fetching desired data or content from an html pages. During my work, i had to build a Miner to get news from multiple sites & update a wordpress blog with the latest news, daily.I had many choices to accomplish this task, few of them are
- Regular expressions
- PHP string functions.
- Using DOM Parsing
- Using Xpath.

First of all i used regular expressions to extract data from a static html page.Which was really a nightmare for me.As there is not proper structure of page, it was really hard to extract news from specific tags.Some of them were in Div,some were in TD & others in Li tags. After a long effort i couldn’t extract data using regular expressions.
I thought to use some html parser, some of them are available on internet.I used it to get data of my choice, even it couldn’t get desired data, becuase of complexity of structure of page.After that i tried to use PHP string functions, like str_replace,Trim etc, to replace specific tags with known id, so that parsing can get easy. But still, to get desired content, it was really a mess to get to them.

Finally i used firebug to analyze the content of the page, to see the content holders, during which, i cam to find exact XPath location of desired content holder.
XPath (XML Path Language) is a language for selecting nodes from an XML document. In addition, XPath may be used to compute values (strings, numbers, or boolean values) from the content of an XML document. but i wasn’t aware that Xpath can also be used with html pages, to parse the DOM tree of page.

finally, i got the exact path of Content holder, which had the latest news, daily updated. And i grabbed all the content from it.

I came to conclusion that in case of mining data from web, Xpath proved to be the best & most efficient.

In case of updates, we don’t need anything, but only the content holder Xpath tree structure of the content & we can get the content in single shot.Regular expression & other ways were very inefficient & time consuming.

Thanks to Farhan for sharing his valuable expertise with us on Fahd Murtaza’s Blog.

Do you wanna be social? Are you social on the web? Is your website in accordance with the “social” requirements as laid out by the web 2.0 standard. Do you want to say “yeah” but are afraid of saying it as it might be wrong as you still dont know what exactly 2.0 is. OK, let me add something (thats not new off course but clarifies a little about the social aspect of the web). The web 2.0 is about the usability factor of the web. Sites like Flickr and Google calendar are a very good example of usability. Both have social factors about them. Like on Flickr, people can comment on your photos, photos that you want to share. Also you can post photos to your blog right from your Flickr account and there are dozens of good services that can be integrated with Flickr through an API provided by Flickr. It uses AJAX for making it more usable but yeah the Social Factor like submitting your photos to public groups of similar interests make it more approachable by the users of the site.

This Flickr example is just to mention how social networking helps people to collaborate and find the things of their interests. Social networks like Orkut, Facebook, MySpace and lots more are being used by Millions of Surfers on daily basis to enjoy the Social Web.

Another popular web 2.0 application is blogging engines. Yeah you are reading this text on a blog too that is off course my personal one. What if you want to enjoy the social features of the web for your blog. You wanna be heard right? So use social bookmarking. WordPress blogging engine, which runs most of this website is a great tool for blogging, in fact for content publishing so what if you like to use social bookmarking for your blog. There are several plugins available for social bookmarking but yeah as usual I am writing about a simple and usable one.

Use

Sociable

Social bookmarking sites allow web surfers to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find online. The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts, increasing your potential audience.

If you’d like to keep up with Sociable development, you can read the tagged posts on this blog (feed). Or just read all of this blog, I swear it’s so amazing you’ll be sneezing rainbows.

Download, Upgrading, Installation

Download Sociable 2.0 (released 2007-02-02)

To upgrade, first deactivate Sociable and remove the sociable directory, then follow the install instructions.

Read the rest about Sociable here.

Well I was thinking that the old source code I got from the other guy Nouman who was working on this Home Work Center Project that was and is being coded in CodeIgniter was not very much upto date. I fixed the Javascript issues; in fact a lot of them including the JavaScript date picker calendar. It fits well, works on IE 6, IE7, Safari and Firefox; haven’t yet checked with others. But I am sure it will!. Anyhow the problem I was facing was that in different folders in Views for CodeIgniter , if we are using images, we have to use relative URLs in most of the pages, which gets quite troublesome sometimes. As long as it is the CodeIgniter I am working on, I don’t want to use my own includes having setting of the site because this is why we are using CodeIgniter .

Solution:

So cutting short the details, if you want to use the site’s URL and relative paths according to your site’s base url, here is the solution use site_url(). The link contains all the details you will need to use for your views and it also tells which helpers you need to load.

I have started loving CodeIgniter as its quite flexible and user friendly. I always wondered there would be an easy platform with easy learning curve ever for PHP programmer. So I am learning it and also working on a home work center project for Silicon Valley Education Foundation /San Jose Educational Foundation. If you are interested in learning and using a very neat, easy, well documented, light and easily configurable php framework, codeigniter can be a great choice. CodeIgniter is a product of EllisLab

I was looking for screen scraping a site for getting the download links off the site and I found this intersting tutorial. It makes you able to  get the content from a page and make it into RSS. Easily customizable thing. Just go for it. (Link on the full post.)

http://www.phpit.net/article/screenscrap-rss/1/

I am with my best days of learning web development now a days! Having coffee on my cabin’s table where me and my computer live together. Ah its quite bitter , I am still not good at making cape chino! But I am still happy as I have learned new things today. I have always been looking for some great JavaScript libraries that would do some really nice tricks like animation effects and user friendly techniques with easy to code syntax and minimal lines of code to call a specfic functionality. So I got it today.

And dear readers, I was really amazed at the high profile sites who are using it for example Gucci ,Digg , Apple fluxiom , Basecamp , Shopify , Blinksale , Backpack , Feedburner , Mailroom , Ruby on Rails and many others.

Isn’t that impressive? yeah I am sure it is!

Be sure to check out the demos, too: effects engine , autocompleter , drag’n'shop , puzzle game

 I will be using it with the codignitor , the new PHP framework that I am  goin g to use for my new project thats a CMS system for teachers to help manage their content for students. It focuses on Web 2.0 with Rich dynamic features!