In a recent post on the 99Points.info blog Zeeshan Rasool walks you through the steps to create a share button with URL shortening using PHP, jQuery and curl.

These days every website must contain a section that is called '�Share This'�. After creating facebook style posting and youtube style rating system I have now come to share button. I have created youtube style share button with url shortening script. Try the demo and use this awesome tutorial on your web pages.

His tutorial includes all of the code needed - Javascript, PHP and some CSS - to create a small "share this" button that can be embedded in your site to open pages on the remote sites with the shortened URL for the current page.

PHPRiot.com has posted the latest tutorial in their Zend Framework 101 series, a look at using Zend_Gdata_YouTube to pull information from the popular video sharing site.

The Zend Framework contains a number of APIs for accessing Google services, including YouTube. In this article I will show you how to retrieve a feed of videos from YouTube using the Zend_Gdata_YouTube class within Zend_Gdata. [...] To simplify things in this article, we're going to use the service to retrieve videos for a specific user, and we're going to do so using anonymous authentication.

Included in the tutorial are the methods for pulling a list of videos for a given YouTube username and looping over the resulting list to display them as links to a page. This includes examples of fetching information like date published, last update and embedding the videos (or thumbnails) directly into the page. For more information on the component, see this section of the Zend Framework manual.

On the Stoimen.com blog there's a new post showing how you can connect your script to YouTube's API via the Zend_Gdata_YouTube component complete with pagination support.

The task is to read the entire Gdata from a YouTube's channel. It may sound easy, but as you may know Gdata is based on the Atom publishing protocol, and it naturally gives you only the latest few items.

The component lets you go through the pages of content from a user or channel on YouTube and pull out the metadata about each. Code is included to show you how to make the connection, get the thumbnail information for each video and push it back out the other side in an nice, clean array.

If you were at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo, you probably remember the Appcelerator team that was there promoting their product in the expo. Well, they also spent some time interviewing some of the attendees about PHP and their experiences with it. The Zend Developer Zone points out that they've now posted these to YouTube.

Appcelerator was a sponsor at ZendCon 08 this year but obviously they were much more as well. They created a series of videos from interviews they shot while there.

It's a series of four videos with titles like "Developers Hate PHP!", "Developers Love PHP!" and some "PHP Developer Gripes". Check them out and see if you can spot some of the notable names in the PHP community.

In a recently posted tutorial on the Zend Developer Zone website, Cal Evans has pointed out a video showing PHP pushing videos out to YouTube.

Attention all you Zend Framework junkies, Jochen Hartmann has uploaded a new video to YouTube that demonstrates the basics of how to use Zend Framework with the YouTube Data API. This step-by-step demonstration walks you though everything you need to know to upload files to Youtube via Zend Framework.

The video (from the official Google developers) shows the creation of a simple application that uses the Google Data component of the Zend Framework to upload the selected video from their local machine.

You can find out more about the Google API for YouTube on this page on the Google Code website.

In this new tutorial on the IBM developerWorks website, they show you how - with a little simple HTML and PHP - to integrate functionality from the YouTube API into your site.

The YouTube video sharing site allows Web application developers to access public content through its REST-based developer API. [...] This article introduces the YouTube Data API, demonstrates how you can use it to browse user-generated video content; access video metadata, comments and responses; and perform keyword searches.

They help you get started by outlining the format that the YouTube messages use (Atom feeds) and how to run a query against the API and return back the custom data for things like video categories, popularity and the results of keyword searches.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new post from Bill Karwin highlighting the Zend_GData component of the Zend Framework and how it can help grab information from the Google Data APIs.

The recent Zend Framework 1.0.3 release includes new support for some great services, including Picasa Web Albums, YouTube, and Google Documents List.

He talks about the interfaces for each of these (including what you can grab) and includes some pointers to example code that can be used with either the full framework or just the GData bundle. There's also a video demo of the component being used to fetch data from the Data API.

Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"

Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.

He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).

Continuing on from their previous post on integrating PHP and the YouTube API, WaxJelly is back today with part two focusing on a cleaner, more powerful implementation of the script.

This is Part 2 of the YouTube API PHP Script. I've added a good bit of functionality, fixed a few bugs, and cleaned up the code from some unnecessary redundancies. However, I'm leaving Part 1 up for those of you who want the introduction. I'm mainly going to highlight the stuff that's new in this script and, as always, provide the code at the bottom of this post.

He shows the updates made, including:

• cleaning up of the $_GET vars
• the addition of constants
• new functions to help with setting up the page
• a function to loop through the results
• a large function to create the HTML in the output
• a function to add a "bookend" for each video pulled

On the WaxJelly blog today, there's a new tutorial showing how to combine PHP and the YouTube API interface to grab the information and a thumbnail of videos matching your search.

For the purposes of this tutorial, you'll only need to change one variable to actually see the script in action. If you don't have a youtube API developer ID, you can get one for free here. Other than that, this is a primative script that grabs the info, styles it into manageable chunks, and displays the first 4 pages of results.

First, they set up the values they're defaulting to in the script (GET vars). The call to the REST API is next, passing along the method, developer ID, page, number to show per page, and the tag to search on. The results of this are pulled in with teh file_get_contents and parsed with SimpleXML and looped through, combined with HTML, and outputted into a page looking something like this.