tweeting pipes

juust | 30/06/2009

…but serious, channels on Twitter are a hot item.

Twitter seem to want branded channels for commerce by using verified accounts to prevent spoofing celebrities, and the same goes for brandnames. There is already a growing trade in twitter accounts like @nike-shoes, @skyeurope.

To build an attractive channel I need credibility, provide regular good quality fresh content, so where do I get that :

Yahoo pipes

I am very lazy and Yahoo have a nice example online, the news aggregator with 14 sources like blogsearch, icerocket, technorati, that you can clone and use out of the box. So I cloned it, replaced the technorati api key and run the pipe with ‘banking’ as keyword. I grab the rss feed url and read that with simplexml (you can use that pipe with any keyword).

Then I take a twitter php api class from sourceforge (it only reads the account, it doesnt have the post-routines), by simon wippich, wire in the rss-feed and start posting content.

  1. require_once('twitter.class.php');
  2. $Twitter = Twitter::getInstance();
  3. $Twitter->setUser('Account','SomePassword');
  4.  
  5. $rss= simplexml_load_file("http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=1234567890&_render=rss&textinput1=banking");
  6.  
  7. if($rss)
  8. {
  9.     foreach($rss->channel->item as $e)
  10.     {
  11.         $shrunk = file_get_contents('http://bit.ly/api?url='.$e->link);
  12.         $msg = trim(substr($e->title, 0, (137-strlen($shrunk)))).' '.$shrunk;
  13.         $output = $Twitter->post($msg);
  14.     }
  15. }

neofinance

Now I can post proper stuff.

The second part of a channel is the audience.

Where to get my audience ?

Google Search

Google serp scrapers are always good for 1000 targetted results on any keyword : i use
allinanchor:twitter.com/ site:twitter.com banking
as search phrase, that gets me 95% valid accounts with my keyword banking in the description

  1. $key = 'banking';
  2. //scrape urls
  3. $urls = twt_Google('allinanchor:twitter.com/ site:twitter.com '.$key);
  4. //get the account names
  5. $accounts = twt_Google_getaccounts($urls);
  6.  
  7. function twt_Google($keywords, $pages=1) {
  8. //scrape results off of google serp    
  9.     $lang='en';
  10.     $results=100;
  11.     for($i=0;$i< $pages;$i++){
  12.         $start = $i*100+1;
  13.         $vargoogleresultpage = "http://www.google.com/search?as_q=".urlencode(trim($keywords))."&num=".$results."&start=".$start."&hl=en&lr=lang_en";
  14.         $googleresponse = join("",file($vargoogleresultpage));
  15.         $googlehits = preg_split('/class=r><a /', $googleresponse, -1, PREG_SPLIT_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
  16.         $i=0;
  17.         foreach($googlehits as $googlehit){
  18.                 $i++;
  19.                 preg_match("/href=\"(.*?)\"/", $googlehit[0], $t, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
  20.                 $the_urls[] = $t[1][0];
  21.         }        
  22.     }
  23.  
  24.     //return a set with twitter urls http://www.twitter.com/account
  25.     return $the_urls;
  26. }
  27.  
  28. function twt_Google_getaccounts($arr) {
  29. //get the account name from the twitter-url
  30.     for($i=0;$i<count($arr);$i++){
  31.         $parts = explode('/', $arr[$i]);
  32.         //account is 3 : http: // … / account
  33.         $myaccounts[] = $parts[3];
  34.     }
  35.     return $myaccounts;
  36. }

There is my audience, lets make some friends :

  1.  
  2. for($i=0;$i<count ($accounts);$i++){
  3.      followthisone($accounts[$i], 'Account','SomePassword');
  4. }
  5.  
  6. function followthisone($accountname, $name, $pass) {
  7.     $url = "http://twitter.com/friendships/create/".$accountname.".xml";
  8.     $ch = curl_init();
  9.     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
  10.     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
  11.     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $name.":".$pass);
  12.     $result= curl_exec ($ch);
  13.     curl_close ($ch);
  14. }

hello friends!

Anyways, that’s the basic ingredients of a marketing channel, proper content and an audience.

         

Comments
No Comments »
Categories
seo tips and tricks
Tags
twitter
Comments rss Comments rss
Trackback Trackback

gwt plugin

juust | 21/06/2009

I am making a quick google webmaster tools plugin for wordpress.

Gwt is a ‘green’ api, meaning google can change it without notice, and have not made a long term commitment to it, so neither will I. But as they added access to crawlissues and keywords (not the link-cosmos yet) it is becoming interesting for seo work.

I used wordpress because its a nice script-host, but with some modifications it can work standalone.

It has a php class, mysql table backend, jquery ajax api access, list/add/verify/remove sites, crawlissues, keywords. I will add the messages and sitemaps and later on some export stuff.

In a week or two I’ll put a first version up for a testdrive.

note : dev. version is overhere

         
Comments
3 Comments »
Categories
juust, wordpress
Comments rss Comments rss
Trackback Trackback

ga api sample : get pageviews

juust | 13/05/2009

I was going to put that online : how to get the pageviews out of the google analytics api, using simplexml and php. Google use three namespaces in the output file which make it less easy accessible, so here’s a quick sample of how to get your sites pageviews out of it :

  1. //ids           = site identifier (from the site data feed)
  2. //metrics     = what i want to see
  3. //start-date
  4. //end-date
  5.  
  6. $feedUri = "https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data?ids=ga:10516419&metrics=ga:pageviews&start-date=2009-04-01&end-date=2009-05-01";    
  7.  
  8.  $curl = curl_init();
  9.  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $feedUri);
  10.  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 3);
  11.  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  12.  
  13.        $headers[] = "Authorization: GoogleLogin auth=".$Authtoken;
  14.  
  15. //for authtoken : see previous post
  16.  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
  17.  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
  18.  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
  19.  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
  20.  
  21. //get the string containing the xml file
  22.  $gA = curl_exec($curl);

the feed has three namespaces (atom, opensearch and dxp/analytics), a simple way is accessing the ENTRY tags (from the Atom namespace), in that tag is one DXP: line and that has the answer to the question.

<dxp:metric confidenceInterval=’0.0′ name=’ga:pageviews’ type=’integer’ value=’755′/>

  1. //load the string into a simple xml object
  2.  $feed = simplexml_load_string($gA);
  3.  
  4. //take the atom namespace
  5.  $children =  $feed->children('http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom');
  6.  
  7. //take the entry tags
  8.  $parts = $children->entry;
  9.  foreach ($parts as $entry) {
  10.  
  11.         //from the entry tag,
  12.         //access the dxp namespace
  13.   $dxp = (object) $entry->children('http://schemas.google.com/analytics/2009');
  14.  
  15.         //METRIC contains the answer to the question
  16.         //grab from the tag METRIC the attribute VALUE
  17.                 echo   (string) $dxp->metric->attributes()->value;
  18.  
  19.         }

Important is using the (string) typecast, normally simplexml returns a simplexml object, when you force a string type, it gives the actual metric ga:pageview value attribute as number.

         
Comments
No Comments »
Categories
google, php
Tags
analytics, api, ga, google, namespaces, php, simplexml
Comments rss Comments rss
Trackback Trackback

« Previous Entries

login panel

You know the routine.

Member Login

Lost your password?

Not a member yet? Sign Up!