Matthew Watts

Ever wanted to get a list of information such as URLs, Articles, tabular data, or whatever else that you know is on one website or across multiple websites, then manipulate it to reuse elsewhere? Stop wondering, because we are about to get down to business! There’re many ways to scrape / mine data, but I’ve found that the easiest and most efficient way is to use a combination of cURL and XPATH. cURL is neat because it will easily let you use proxies, manipulate browser information, catch errors, etc. XPATH is great because you don’t need to write a bunch of regular expressions or other functions to manage the data [...]

You know that feeling you get when you’re driving down the Interstate and there are a few large trucks and tractor trailers all around you, the wind is blowing their trailers toward you, and then out of nowhere a car comes within 3 inches of hitting you as it drives up from behind you and passes you in that tiny space between you and the tractor trailers—all without using their blinker? It makes you want to scream because of how inconsiderate it was and could have really hurt your car, yes; you care more about your car at that moment than realizing you could have died in a wreck. I [...]

Ever wondered how to make one of those snazzy “Contact Us” forms to send someone’s comments to your E-mail when they are viewing your website? Your search is over, because I’m about to show you how to make one. Requirements Basic HTML Knowledge Basic PHP Knowledge Anyone can learn a good bit from this tutorial without knowing HTML or PHP. However, to be able to manipulate the code to fit your specific website and needs, you’ll need a basic understanding of those languages. Fortunately, you’ll pick up a fair amount of both as you follow along. Before We Begin Before you start any programming project, you need to flesh out [...]

Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m a pretty active member of Wickedfire (Rexibit is my username). There are a lot of controversial discussions there, most of which really make you think. Recently, someone said they were tired of Firefox and saying goodbye. Now, being a webmaster forum, most everyone uses Firefox. It has the most and best extensions to make SEO and developing websites easier. So, it’s pretty obvious what most of the replies were – including mine. After thinking about it for awhile, I did start looking into the OP’s point – Chrome is a little faster for most websites and not as bloated. I’ve had Chrome installed [...]

As part of the MIT curriculum we are going to be developing iPhone applications. To start off, web apps are the focus. As the first step to creating them, we have been covering some basic concepts and meta tag properties that allow regular web pages to be targeted to the Safari Mobile browser that is on the iPhone. The code should also work for any browser that uses WebKit. I am very interested in this area because it is good insight into how standard web pages can be re-arranged to be optimized for mobile users without much additional effort in creating a separate page for them – then just having [...]