It's amazing how just a little optimization on the part of myspace makes crawling their site so much easier. We're going to scrape the user detail (name, age, sex, etc..) from a profile, using the header info...

The script grabs the contents of the given URL, loops through, pulls out the meta tag information and uses that as a key to grab the rest of the user's information (including name, age, city, state, etc).

This is another entry in the series of interviews I did at OSCON 2006. This time, I was privileged to sit down with Andrei Zmievski and talk about Unicode, Yahoo and other PHP topics. Andrei is a native of Uzbekistan and came to the US to study when he was 16 years old. He now works at Yahoo on their Infrastructure team and is pursuing a Master's degree in Linguistics.

They talk about Unicode for PHP6 (Andrei's big push), the status and some specifics of the project, his work wth Yahoo!, a look towards the future of PHP, and some of Andrei's personal background - including how he came to the PHP community.

Web frameworks have been all the rage lately, and for good reason. They eliminate a great deal of the mindless repetition involved in creating Web applications large and small.

Spurred on by the enormous success of Rails, PHP developers have been hard at work creating a number of framework solutions. Notable efforts include Cake, Symfony, and, more recently, the Zend Framework.

They start with the output of the scripts, two tables worth of data - a list of the sales rank and the details on a specific book. Then it's on to the good stuff - the creation of the controller to connect to Amazon, the views to output the data, and the method to make the request and populate the database.