Posted on
by

For many reasons, not least of which their decision to appoint a surveillance loving war criminal to their board of directors, I’ve been steadily migrating away from Dropbox.

Thankfully, there is a drop-in replacement for much of it, providing you run your own server. So, I’ve got a syncing file store/backup running across my devices, which can be accessed while I’m on the go as well.

However, one of the things I do use dropbox for (which is not terribly important in the grand scheme of things, but which I find quite useful) is, via the use of an IFTTT rule, to take a copy of any photos I’m tagged in on Facebook, so that I can see them (and to break them out of the silo) without actually having to go onto Facebook. This is possible using dropbox, owing to it being a centralised service, but obviously isn’t possible using your own server.

Webhooks to the rescue!

So a little while ago I put together a hack that used IFTTT’s wordpress channel to add a pluggable webhooks interface to IFTTT.

Since this tool supports plugins, I was therefore able to write a simple Facebook adapter which, when triggered would extract the image URL from the push message and then simply download it.

Since my owncloud install was on the same server, all I had to do was output this file to the appropriate owncloud data directory and any files retrieved are automatically synced to your client devices. You can of course opt to write to any directory, and not use owncloud at all, but since I wanted a like for like replacement for IFTTT+Dropbox I went for owncloud server storage!

Here’s the facebookphoto.php plugin code:

]*src *= *["\']?([^"\']*)/', $object->description, $matches))
                {
                        $url = $matches[1];

                        $parsed = parse_url($url);

                        if ($object->pass == $this->expected_password) {
                        
                                $filename = basename($parsed['path']);

                                file_put_contents($this->owncloud_path.$filename, file_get_contents($url));
                        }
                }
            
            return $object;
        }
    }

Simple, and obviously you could extend this to do other things with it.

Place the code in your plugins directory, and create a new recipe on ifttt triggering your plugin whenever you’re tagged on Facebook, remembering to pass plugin:FacebookPhoto as your category.

» Visit the Ifttt webhook project on github...

Posted on
by

Net neutrality, the principle that all data flowing over the internet is treated equally, sounds like a rather dry and technical subject. But, it is important.

Net neutrality is the reason why the internet is such fertile ground for innovation – anyone with a good idea can compete, on merit, and overturn an established player. It lets little news outlets go toe to toe with the big boys, which is important for our democracy.

Ending net neutrality would mean that big companies and media organisations would be able to pay a fee in order to secure their dominant position and to squeeze out competition – meaning fewer voices, higher prices and worse services for you.

While this is ostensibly a US problem, when the US sneezes the rest of the world gets a cold, and the internet is global.

Write to the FCC

Posted on
by

Anyone who has done any development with PHP will be familiar with the infamous White Screen of Death; a blank browser window indicating that something horrible has gone wrong. A common cause, for me at least, is making a method call on a null object – easy to do in an object oriented architecture.

The exact reason as to why your script has gone splat will be reported in the log file, but from a UX standpoint, giving a blank screen to your customers is far from ideal. It is particularly problematic in complicated platforms like Elgg and Known, which use output buffering and have a plugin architecture.

Here’s a quick bit of code which can catch many (all?) of these fatal errors, and at least echo something. A variation of this is already in Known. Place the code somewhere towards the start of your script…

register_shutdown_function(function () {
        $error = error_get_last();
        if ($error["type"] == E_ERROR) {
            
            // If you use output buffering, chuck away any existing buffer
            ob_clean();

            // Set an appropriate HTTP error code
            http_response_code(500);

            // Construct your error message
            $error_message = "Fatal Error: {$error['file']}:{$error['line']} - \"{$error['message']}\", on page {$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']}{$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']}";

            // Display a friendly message to your customers, giving them an option to email you about it!
            echo "
Sorry, FizzBuzz experienced a problem!
";
            echo "FizzBuzz experienced a problem with this page and couldn't continue. The technical details are as follows:
";
            echo "$error_message";
            echo "
If you like, you can email us for more information
.";

            // You'll also want to write the error to your log
            error_log($error_message);

            exit;
        }
});

Hope this is useful to you!