Photo by ~toxictwo on deviantART

In order to complete this tutorial you will need to apply for a flickr API key. You will also need to download a copy of phpFlickr API Kit. The use of an API Kit makes the use of flickr’s API methods easier. You can also view the demo page of the tutorial (opens in a new tab).

Let’s begin. First, we need to include the phpFlickr main file and then create a new phpFlickr object which is stored in the $phpFlickrObj variable. Make sure you enter the correct path (where you extracted the phpFlickr files) and also enter your flickr API key.

require_once("phpFlickr/phpFlickr.php");
$phpFlickrObj = new phpFlickr('Your_Flickr_API_Key');

The next step is to obtain your NSID by using your flickr username (in the example I’m using my flickr username), which is stored in the $user variable. Using this NSID, we get the url to the specific user’s photos and we store it in the $user_url variable. Finally, we get an array ($photos) containing all the relevant information (id, title, etc.) of the last four (if you want to change the number of photos, just change the number) photos appearing in the user’s photostream.

$user = $phpFlickrObj->people_findByUsername('stathisg');
$user_url = $phpFlickrObj->urls_getUserPhotos($user['id']);
$photos = $phpFlickrObj->people_getPublicPhotos($user['id'], NULL, NULL, 4);

In this example we use only the id and the title of each photo. If you want to view all the information contained in the array, you can use print_r($photos).

The final step to display the photos, is to convert the multidimensional array into an array of one dimension and use a loop to display everything. The following code, displays the photos. The photos can be displayed in six different sizes. To change the size, you need to alter the “square” value. The available sizes are: square, thumbnail, small, medium, large and original.

foreach ($photos['photos']['photo'] as $photo)
{
  echo '<a href="'.$user_url.$photo['id'].'" title="'.$photo['title'].' (on Flickr)" target="_blank">';
  echo '<img alt="'.$photo['title'].'" src="'.$phpFlickrObj->buildPhotoURL($photo, "square").'" />';
  echo '</a>';
}

The complete code is diplayed below. You can also view the demo page of the tutorial (opens in a new tab).

require_once("phpFlickr/phpFlickr.php");
$phpFlickrObj = new phpFlickr('46dea5f6abb12aed7a823adb7ecf5816');

$user = $phpFlickrObj->people_findByUsername('stathisg');
$user_url = $phpFlickrObj->urls_getUserPhotos($user['id']);
$photos = $phpFlickrObj->people_getPublicPhotos($user['id'], NULL, NULL, 4);

foreach ($photos['photos']['photo'] as $photo)
{
  echo '<a href="'.$user_url.$photo['id'].'" title="'.$photo['title'].' (on Flickr)" target="_blank">';
  echo '<img alt="'.$photo['title'].'" src="'.$phpFlickrObj->buildPhotoURL($photo, "square").'" />';
  echo '</a>';
}

11 comments | belongs to: tutorials

Creation by ~dhuse on deviantART

If you are using twitter’s API to display your tweets in your Website you have probably faced the problem that your mentions (e.g. @burnmind), hashtags (e.g. #question) and URLs are displayed as plain text and not as active links. You can fix this in a very easy way, using regular expressions in php.

Assuming that you have stored your tweet in the variable named $tweet, you’ll only need the following three lines of code to convert the mentions and URLs to links:

$tweet = preg_replace("/((http)+(s)?:\/\/[^<>\s]+)/i", "<a href=\"\\0\" target=\"_blank\">\\0</a>", $tweet );

$tweet = preg_replace("/[@]+([A-Za-z0-9-_]+)/", "<a href=\"http://twitter.com/\\1\" target=\"_blank\">\\0</a>", $tweet );

$tweet = preg_replace("/[#]+([A-Za-z0-9-_]+)/", "<a href=\"http://twitter.com/search?q=%23\\1\" target=\"_blank\">\\0</a>", $tweet );

If you don’t know how to retrieve your tweet using the twitter’s API you can learn how by reading the following tutorials:

how to retrieve and display your latest tweet using PHP
how to store and retrieve your latest tweet from an XML file

5 comments | belongs to: tutorials

Photo by ~basia-hs on deviantART

Retrieving and displaying a tweet using the twitter API in real-time as discussed in “how to retrieve and display your latest tweet using PHP” can sometimes produce errors due to twitter’s inability to handle a lot of simultaneous request from multiple users. To deal with that, you can store the tweet in an XML file and retrieve it from there, so you don’t have to rely on twitter’s availability. This way is more efficient and will improve the loading time of the page.

First, you need to create a file named loadtweet.php which will load the latest tweet the usual way, will perform a check to find out if the result is an actual tweet and not an error message by computing the tweet’s length (it must have a maximum length of 140 characters) and will finally save the whole respond to an XML file called tweet.xml:

$twitter_url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/yourTwitterUserName.xml?count=1';
$buffer = file_get_contents($twitter_url);

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($buffer);
$status_item = $xml -> status;
$status =  $status_item -> text;
$length = strlen($status);

if ($length < 141)
{
$file = fopen("tweet.xml", "w");
fwrite($file, $buffer);
fclose($file);
}

Your Web Server can be scheduled to execute this file automatically, for example every one minute, using a Cron Job (reffer to your Web Server’s Control Panel or your Hosting Company to find out how to schedule a Cron Job).

To retrieve the tweet from the XML file and display it wherever you want in your page, use the following code:

$xml = simplexml_load_file("tweet.xml");
$status_item = $xml -> status;
$status =  $status_item -> text;
echo $status;

2 comments | belongs to: tutorials