Monday, March 04, 2002

PHP And Regular Expressions 101. Regular expressions needn't be tools exclusive to UNIX shell programmers and Perl gurus. As guest author Mitchell Harper explains, adding basic regular expression functions to your PHP code is simpler than you might think. 0304 [WebReference News] 2:02:32 PM     Scripting News - In stealth mode, I've been working on a project called RCS, or Radio Community Server. It's basically at an alpha level now. The idea is to make installing the centralized side of a Radio community as easy as installing Radio on a workstation. It's a fascinating bootstrap, the software is ready, but I need users. How to entice them? Features, of course. So this morning I'm turning in a different direction, I'm working on the Web Bug Simulator for XML feeds. It's very interesting, along the lines of the articles by Udell and Gillmor. A lab for developing community services. OK, here's the idea. We can track hits and referers for HTML by putting a web bug in the page, and when the browser loads the page it asks for the bug, and with a little Javascript magic, we can tabulate and rank the sites, and count the referers. But how to do that for an XML feed which only goes through the browser after being digested by the aggregator? Not so hard to figure out when you phrase the question that way. But there's an opportunity for refinement because my client code is less crude than the meager power the HTML browser gives me. I'm tracking the number of new stories times the number of people who read it, so a site that doesn't update its XML feed falls off the chart, as it should, because it's not saying anything new even if a lot of people are subscribing. Anyway I hope to have some results to show for this shortly. Diggin. [Scripting News] 8:20:18 AM     Jenny the librarian: "I've come to believe that news aggregation based on RSS feeds of web sites (newspapers, blogs, magazines, etc.) is the future and that the Net Gens will grow up with this as their primary news source."  [Scripting News] 8:16:07 AM     Community: K12LTSP + School + LUG = Saved Money  Thanks to Anthony Awtrey, who writes: I am pleased to announce the recent successful K12 Linux Terminal Server Project deployment at the St. Mary's Catholic School in Rockledge, Florida assisted by volunteers from the Melbourne Linux Users Group, Inc. (Melbourne, Florida USA). The school estimates it has saved thousands of dollars in license fees and has been able to field lower powered, dontated computer equipment than would have been possible otherwise. I am very proud of the work done by the K12LTSP developers, the St. Mary's school and the volunteers from the MLUG and I.D.E.A.L. Technology Corporation. There are pictures and more details available here, here and here. [Linux Today] 8:07:08 AM

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