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Synook

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Everything posted by Synook

  1. You can use the file_get_contents() function or a HTTP library like cURL to retrieve the content from the third-party website. If they publish their statistics in RSS or another XML-based format, then of course you can use an XML library like DOMDocument to parse the results, otherwise if the information is only available on their HTML site, you can try using the XML library on the HTML anyway, but if that doesn't work your best best would probably be regular expressions. Once you have the data you can just insert it into your database as normal. To make the script run every day you can use cron (Unix) or Scheduled Tasks (Windows).
  2. The GitHub for Mac documentation says you can use it for any Git repository: "... if you wish to use a non-GitHub remote, it will work just fine. Set the remote manually in the settings tab and everything else should work as expected."
  3. Please do not reply to extremely old topics.
  4. PHP operates on the server-side, and is completely transparent to clients (except for the .php extension, I suppose, but search engines don't care about that). The main issue, I suppose, though not restricted to PHP, is that if you have a complicated querystrings (the bit after the ? in URLs), search engines can get confused when trying to differentiate between different pages. To solve this, you can use URL rewriting (though the use, for example, of mod_rewrite on Apache) to rewrite your URLs from something more pleasant. Or just try not to have complicated querystrings .
  5. You can probably use some Javascript to make it play an ad, then load the actual video.
  6. It will appear to you as a normal web server, and you just request files off it (according to the S3 manual, you use a URL of the form https://s3.amazonaws.com/Bucket/Object). You can embed the videos in your site using the <video> tag as before, or hyperlink if you want people to be able to download them easily. P.S. I've noticed you seem to be replying to some old topics on this forum — if there has been no activity in a thread for a while, it's probably not worth it to respond.
  7. If you want, you can have a fallback Flash-based video player. You could also make that the default and only display the HTML 5 one if the user doesn't have Flash installed (like what Youtube does now).
  8. You can tell Youtube doesn't actually stream — when you watch a video, you will see two bars in the bit where it tells you how long the video is — the red bar represents how much you've watched, but there is another light-grey bar that shows how much of the video is actually downloaded (you can click anywhere in this area and have the video immediately play) — so Youtube just downloads the video in the background, but plays it back at the same time. Interestingly enough, Youtube also has an alternative HTML 5 video player. You don't need to have your entire site on Amazon S3, as it is just a storage service, and doesn't come with things like server-side language support, database servers, etc. (at least, not that I am aware of). You can host most of your site on a regular web server, then just request the videos from S3. I doubt a 10-minute video will be that big — if you encode it, for example, at 500 kb/s (VCD quality), then it will only be 37.5 MB. As for whether you'd be able to make a profit with ads, it probably depends on your audience. Also, you shouldn't take my advice incautiously — I have never set up such a site before and am just using my general knowledge; some of what I said may not end up working .
  9. As I said, Youtube doesn't use video streaming, just a simultaneous download-playback mechanism (streaming is where the data is immediately displayed as it is received and not stored at all). HTTP can't do actual streaming, you need a protocol like MMS for that (though, you probably don't need/want actual streaming, as that is much, much more complicated to set up). If you need scalable bandwidth then you may want to look at a service like Amazon S3, which will give you as much bandwidth as you need at a cost per-data-unit-transferred. The geographically diverse CDNs of such services will also ensure that your content doesn't come out of a single data centre but instead from somewhere close to the client, reducing latency. While I am sure it is possible to transcode video on-demand using PHP (or at least, by hooking into a system utility through PHP), I do not recommend this at all. Transcoding takes a long, long, long time, and uses a LOT of computing power — the average quad-core desktop PC will have its entire processing power consumed for, say, about ten minutes to convert a three minute video to H.264. You are much better of transcoding videos as they arrive — if you want to do this remotely then some other services, such as Amazon EC2, may help (though it may get expensive). As for what video format is "best", you can see a compatibility chart on Wikipedia. Note that iOS only supports H.264 so if your majority target audience are going to be using iOS then you'd better just use that. If you really want, you can have multiple formats available, but that would of course increase your transcoding cost.
  10. Youtube and most other video-sharing sites don't actually stream video, they just download it as fast as possible while playing it back to the user at the same time. If you display a H.264 video (through the HTML 5 video tag, for example), it will use the same mechanism. This is perfectly feasible to do through HTTP — you just need enough servers / bandwidth to cope with the amount of visitors you get. And yes, you can create any type of website in PHP.
  11. Stay calm, people — I think we have ascertained that Joomla! and certain other free CMSs, in an absolute sense, can be and are used for non-blog applications, but that for Bigjoe, the time, support or ability is simply not present in order for him to make use of said CMSs for anything but how they are in their most basic configurations — hence the need for something more complete out-of-the-box.I also think it is great that the OP is has the will to learn how to achieve what he wants from scratch; however, I just think that perhaps a more open view is needed on existing software is necessary — the idea of "product x will only ever be for purpose y" ignore the extensible nature of open-source software and the flexibility of web technologies. As has been said, it is fine if you are unable to extend the products yourself, but blanket statements such as "joomla is nothing but a blog" are not likely to help. Keep an open mind when learning, and you will find how to make the best use of technologies and existing products to suit your needs; otherwise, you will definitely end up doing more work than necessary.
  12. Well, why don't you just make the "view" link point directly to the PDF file, and the "download" link point to a download.php script like Ingolme presents? Then you don't need a server configuration file.
  13. There's just a missing closing bracket on that line...
  14. It works, but it is invalid - as in, it does not comply by the HTML document type definition: <!ELEMENT A - - (%inline;)* -(A) -- anchor --> <!ENTITY % fontstyle "TT | I | B | BIG | SMALL"><!ENTITY % phrase "EM | STRONG | DFN | CODE | SAMP | KBD | VAR | CITE | ABBR | ACRONYM" ><!ENTITY % special "A | IMG | OBJECT | BR | SCRIPT | MAP | Q | SUB | SUP | SPAN | BDO"><!ENTITY % formctrl "INPUT | SELECT | TEXTAREA | LABEL | BUTTON"><!-- %inline; covers inline or "text-level" elements --><!ENTITY % inline "#PCDATA | %fontstyle; | %phrase; | %special; | %formctrl;"> In general, you aren't supposed to put block elements inside inline ones.
  15. You're not allowed to put divisions inside anchors so the second method is best .
  16. Probably. VBScript for browser scripting only works in Internet Explorer, though.
  17. If you've been trying to actually PM Chocolate570, he's not been active for a little while. If you have any concerns you can message one of the current moderators.
  18. Sorry – I meant intellectual property.
  19. I do wonder how willing W3Schools would be to part with their IP, though. It's very hard to have restrictive copyright on wiki content, especially when people are contributing new content.
  20. boen_robot, you're famous - http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/w...-to-w3fools.php.I think a wiki has the ... potential to work, if it's managed well-enough. The software and all that can be worked out easily. I do wonder how many people would actually contribute, though (the MDC edit log is quite interesting in this regard).
  21. W3Fools - a foolish attack on W3Schools.com | Aspektas Blog
  22. Also, the number of options is already max'd out - any new editor listed would need to supplant another.
  23. Photoshop can create and manipulate images, regardless of their content. So you could create a website mockup in Photoshop... it depends what your definition of "template" is.
  24. Synook

    Signatures

    Also note that general content restrictions laid out in the Guidelines, such as those prohibiting links to rights-infringing content, also apply to signatures.
  25. Well, there are different types of hosting (e.g. shared v dedicated), and some hosts have more features (e.g. Perl, unlimited databases)... but until you find that you really need something your current host doesn't offer, shopping around is probably going to be rather futile.
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