I knocked up a small PHP script that grabs the backend status, finds what is being recorded or watched, compares with the previous run, and sends a message to twitter using wget.

To use it, grab the script, change the username/password variables, chmod +x it, and then add it to your “Startup Applications” or equivalent if you’re not using Ubuntu.

I’ve made a little markup system so that the whole postit can be a link, and the time and location can be overridden (child protection malarky – can’t just put a time and location for some things!)

It’s all written in PHP, using the GD graphics features to put the text on a background image. If you’re interested in the code, comment, and I’ll give it to you (if you link to me!)

Now to actually create an album.  Yes, pretty easy. Upload a file, not so easy, but doable.  Get that file to be shown – next to impossible.  This is the worlds most convoluted software I have ever seen!  To get a photo to be shown, you first have to syncronise, then go and create thumbnails – but wait, by default the synchronise does a dummy run, so go back and tick a tick-box.  Grr, really not usable.  So, I tried looking at the documentation (which goes against my beliefs of websites should never, ever, need any help – they should be usable) and even that is appauling!  It’s a wiki with a very poor navigation structure (if there is any structure), so impossible to find anything useful.  Turn to the forums to find others having the same problem, and being told to read the instructions…

Right, rant over, software uninstalled.

Plogger was the next on the list, the demo looked clean and simple – just what I needed (PHP/MySQL based).  Installed it in a couple of minutes, saw a test album had been created for me so uploaded a photo and job done – it was there!  Then spent the next hour cropping and adjusting the photos, uploaded them, and bob’s your uncle, I have a nice and simple photo gallery for the scouts!  The styling is very minimal, it’s designed to be part of a larger site, although there is one style that’s a little less minimal which I’ve gone for as there’s no “larger site” for this.

So steer clear of piwigo, and let me know if you have any recommendations…

So, you’ve probably gathered that I’ll happily reinvent the wheel many times over, but hopefully for a good result. Magic Hat is very dynamic and has lots of complicated features that I don’t think would have been feasible to get working in something like WordPress without having to learn and change most of WP.

I’ve setup the Magic Hat forums to tweet every time someone posts, but I didn’t really want to use tinyurl/bit.ly as I’d like to keep magichat.co.uk in the links.  So, here’s some code that creates the smallest possible hash.

$letters = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ';
function getHash($i) {
        $string = "";
        while ($i >= strlen($letters)) {
                $string = substr($letters, $i % strlen($letters), 1) . $string;
                $i = floor($i / strlen($letters));
        }
        $string = substr($letters, $i, 1) . $string;
        return $string;
}
function getNumFromHash($string) {
        $letters = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ';
        $k = 0;
        $count = 0;
        for ($j = strlen($string) - 1; $j >= 0; $j--) {
                $letter = substr($string, $j, 1);
                $indexOfLetter = strpos($letters, $letter);
                $k += $indexOfLetter * pow(strlen($letters), $count);
                $count++;
        }
        return $k;
}

So, whenever I want to twitter something, I stick an entry in a database table with the URL and text contents. I grab the auto incrementing ID from the primary key, and pass it into getHash(). Then I run this:

$twitters = sql_array("SELECT id, message, link FROM twitter WHERE sent = 0 ORDER BY id");
if (count($twitters[0]) > 0) {
        foreach ($twitters as $t) {
                $linkLength = 0;
                $link = "";
                $message = $t['message'];
                if (strlen($t['link']) > 0) {
                        $link = "http://magichat.co.uk/w/".function_getHash($t['id']);
                        $linkLength = strlen($link) + 1;
                        $message = substr($message, 0, 140 - $linkLength);
                        $message .= " ".$link;
                }
                $message = urlencode($message);
                $ch = curl_init('http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json');
                curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
                curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 'status='.$message);
                curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, 'magichatuk:PASSWORD');
                curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 0);
                curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
                curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,10);
                $response = curl_exec($ch);
                curl_close($ch);
                sql_update("twitter", "sent = 1", "id = ".$t['id']);
        }
}

sql_array and sql_update are a couple of functions that I’ve written to do stuff with the database, and cache results etc.

The code ensures the full URL is present by shrinking the text if need be.

This line in my .htaccess file directs everything starting /w/ to tinyurl.php

RewriteRule ^w/(.+)    /tinyurl.php?hash=$1

tinyurl.php:

$string = $_GET['hash'];
$k = getNumFromHash($string);
$url = sql_result("link", "ma_twitter", "id = $k");
sql_update("ma_twitter", "hits = hits + 1", "id = $k");
header("Location:http://www.magichat.co.uk".$url);

And the job’s done! Doing it this way (without using tinyurl) means that you can jump to #anchors on the page.

See it in action at http://twitter.com/magichatuk