Carson McDonald has posted an example of how to use the Google OAuth for Installed Apps tool to authenticate users.

I have been working on a long needed update to the Google analytics dashboard plugin for WordPress and one of the items I had on my TODO list was using Google's OAuth login instead of the old ClientLogin. Setting OAuth up for a WordPress plugin is complicated because it isn't a hosted application and as such I can't register it to get OAuth keys. That is where a special way of doing OAuth comes in called OAuth for installed apps.

He uses this OAuth library to handle the "dirty work" of the connections. With that included in the application, he shows how to - in two phases - make an authentication system that direct the user to a Google link for completing the authentication process. He points to the Google OAuth docs and playground as good resources to help you during the process.

On the Liip blog there's a recent post talking about a tool Google offers to help you authenticate your users, a one-time passcode generator called Google Authenticator. The post talks about a PHP port of the same idea.

The main point about 2-step verification is that something else than your computer provides that token. If it's on your computer and that one gets stolen (or hacked into), it won't help much for the additional security. That's why you need a second device for those tokens. Some banks do that with SMS/Text Messages (Facebook, too), other give you special devices for that (eg. RSA keys) and the last group does it with your smartphone.

At the request of a client, they created a tool that did just this, but for PHP. As a result, they created the GoogleAuthenticator library that makes it easy to implement in your application. There's even an example of it in use. For more information about the Google Authenticator tool, see this page on Google Code.

Martin Aarhof has put together an handy tool for Zend Framework applications that creates the async javascript analytic code recommended by Google to provide tracking information back to Analytics.

It supports: browser Settings Detection, campaign Duration, campaign Fields (custom), cross-domain linking and last but not least Ecommerce tracking.

The configuration lets you set the various keys for your Analytics accounts, the domain name for it to live under, browser detection settings and various other settings for campaign configuration and domain setup. You can find the full code on his github account ready to download or clone.

From Superdit.com there's a tutorial showing you how to display search results in an ExtJS grid as pulled from Google's API. The article's from the beginning of the year, but it's a good self-contained example of using ExtJS to automatically pull in data produced from the backend.

This time I want to make a simple example in displaying google web search result in ExtJS grid, other ExtJS component that can be used to displaying this result is dataview, but grid is more common in displaying data in ExtJS.

The code (downloadable here) is pretty simple and the full CSS, Javascript, PHP and markup you'll need are included. The PHP pulls the results from the Google API and

Jonathan Bradley has submitted a handy new helper for the CakePHP users out there that can help to work with Google's Storage in a drop-in plugin - the Simple Google Storage Plugin for CakePHP.

Ever noticed how there is no decent support for CakePHP to utilize Google Storage? Well the wait is over, after realizing that Amazon S3 was just way to unreliable and bloated with spammers and usuage hogs. You can now add Google Storage support to your CakePHP application.

Obviously you'll need to be set up with Google Storage before using it, but the tool makes it as simple as calling publish() to push the data out, return all of the bucket information for your account and pull out information about individual objects. There's also a method that lets you make new buckets on the fly to make categorization simpler.

The heart of the code lies in the Storage class, so if you want to see how it's done, check that first. Other frameworks have their own interfaces with the Google services too, like the Zend Framework's Zend_GData component.

In a new post today Martin Sikora has points out a Google Chrome extension he's created that lets you view some of the basics of the PHP manual without leaving the browser.

Finally, I released my extension for Google Chrome called PHP Ninja Manual (Ninja - because I like Avinash Kaushik'sblog and he always call people who are very skilled in something as "Ninjas"). I was always lazy to open PHP documentation every time I had to look at some method definition and its parameters so I made this extension which is actually preparsed official PHP manual available instantly in a popup window.

You can see a screenshot of it in action here including the auto-complete searching and the example of the function's summary details. If you try it out and have feedback, go over to the forum for it and leave your comments.

Derick Rethans has posted the second part of his look at translating twitter as a part of his PHP-GTK Twitter client Haunt. Because of the deprecation route Google chose for its translation API, he needed a change to another service - the Bing Translation API.

A while ago I wrote in an article about translating tweets in my client Haunt. For the translating itself I was using the Google Translate API, which has sadly be deprecated. Evil after all I suppose. I've now rewritten my translation code to use the Bing Translation APIs instead. You need to register an API key (see http://www.bing.com/developers/appids.aspx) to be able to use the APIs. The APIs that I am using are fairly simple though.

Also included in the post is some sample code showing how to make the request to this new API and the results from the requests.

Sameer Borate has a a new tutorial posted to his blog about grabbing favicons with curl and the help of the Google Shared Stuff API.

Google Shared Stuff allows one to easily get the Favicon of any website with a single line. [...] This [curl request] will display the Favicon in the browser. An even more interesting thing we can do is to save the same to a PNG file.

He includes the code to make the curl request to the Google service and save it as the local PNG file. Built on top of this is another script that handles multiple sites (his example uses six different sites), pulls down each of the images and pushes them all together into one. You can see an example here.

In a a new tutorial posted on his blog Martin Sik shows you how to "steal" the "did you mean..." functionality that Google's sites currently offer. His example uses cURL to get the current Google request URLs and fetch the associated results.

I really like Google and the classic "did you mean" feature is really great, unfortunately when I wanted to implement it into my project a realized that it's not provided by any of Google's APIs. [...] I believe for most developers [having a large dictionary and extend the dictionary when new terms are available] are unachievable. And so it's for me. So I was thinking if I can bypass these drawbacks and let Google do all the job for me.

The source code is included with the post showing two methods - fetching a "did you mean" block to parse or how a term is attached to a Google URL and the results are returned in JSON and parsed for display. Obviously, this is an external dependency you could consider if you put it into your application, but it can be quite a powerful tool in the right situations.

On PHPRiot.com there's a new tutorial showing you how to use the Google Translate service to translate the text of your website into any language they support. They interface with it using a cURL connection and JSON messaging.

Google Translate is a service from Google that you can use to translate text or HTML from one language to another. One of the great features of this service is that they now offer an API to let you programmatically translate text. In this article I will show you how to interact with the Google Translate API. Initially, the Google Translate API was available only via JavaScript. This has now changed, as version 2 offers a REST interface which returns translations in JSON format.

They talk about the input parameters you can give the service, the enforcement of query limits and how to handle the results that are returned. The response message is, by default, in JSON so a simple call to json_decode should be all that's needed. They've also included a sample class you can drop in and use for your translation needs (as well as sample usage code).