{5} Setfive - Talking to the World - Page 62 of 66 - Ramblings on code, startups, and everything in between

A couple of months ago John Resig posted on his blog about a “new” way for users to pick time.

The component is a jQuery plugin called timepickr and I thought it was particularly neat. Anyway, I finally needed to write a form which had a time component so I figured I’d drop in the timepickr jQuery plugin.

It didn’t look like there was a Symfony Forms widget for it so I whipped one up. You can grab it here.

The only issue with timepickr is that it introduces a ton of dependencies. It requires jQuery, jQuery-ui, jQuery.utils, jQuery.string, and ui.dropslide. Additionally, it needs the dropslide css as well as the timepickr css.

The form widget assumes that you will include jquery-ui by yourself since everyone usually has different naming conventions. It will include the other JS files and CSS files for you.

You can download a package with all of the JS and CSS you need here. Again this DOES NOT include the jQuery-ui stuff. YOU have to include that yourself in your Symfony project as well as on the page that you deploy this widget.

To use it, just drop it in your Symfony project somewhere where classes get autoloaded (projectdir/lib works) and then instantiate a widget with new sfWidgetjQueryTimepickr() . It currently will support all of the timepickr options passed in as widget options (on the constructor). Full documentation for timepickr is here.

Have fun picking time.

We use GIT for version control at Setfive. However often with our Symfony projects creating all the ignore files in all the plugins model/base’s and other locations throughout the project get very tiresome. Since on some larger projects you can end up with 10-20 plugins, having to create an ignore for the autogenerated model, forms, and filters takes a long time. Today we really quickly just wrote a plugin that allows you to quickly just run symfony util:generate-ignores git --add-ignores and it will automatically place the .gitignore file throughout your project in the correct locations and add them into your next commit. You can also just have it place them throughout the project, but not add them to the next commit if you drop the --add-ignores option. The plugin also accepts “cvs” instead of git for cvs based projects.

The reason you do not want the base, om, etc. directories in your repository is because every time a person rebuilds the model they will be updating those files(many times just changing the timestamp at the top of the autogenerated files), which causes uncessarily large commits.

You can get the plugin via http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfSCMIgnoresTaskPlugin or install it via symfony plugin:install sfSCMIgnoresTaskPlugin.

If you have any questions/requests shoot us an email.

7/19/2010 UPDATE: There is a BRAND NEW version of the script available on Userscripts here.

10/12/2009 UPDATE: Added fixes from Marcel Chastain

UPDATE: It looks like the version that got uploaded was missing a * in the trigger URL! That might be the issue everyone is having.

UPDATE: Video of the process: fbimport

Facebook’s API + FBConnect is great but it has some severe limitations. Notably, it doesn’t expose all the functionality available on the Facebook site. Tonight in particular, I wanted to be able to copy a dump of my friends’ names and phone numbers off the site to load into a fresh cell phone. Unfortunately, looking at the API this isn’t possible.

Never fear – Greasemonkey provides enough of a hook into Firefox that it would be possible to write a UserScript to accomplish this loans-cash.net.

Continuing beyond this point is probably against the Facebook TOS and will probably severely void your warranty.

You have been warned.

The following describes how to use this userscript to extract your Facebook “Phonebook”. It produces of a CSV of your friends’ names and phone numbers. Fair warning – this is a rough prototype and does almost no error handling. Also, since the “Phone” field is a free text field I can’t promise people will have formatted their numbers in any sane fashion. But either way it’s a good start to revering lost numbers.

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So here is what you need to do to use the script:

1. Install Greasemonkey – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

2. Follow these instructions to install the script – http://userscripts.org/about/installing

Edit: The script is also on Userscripts at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/43681

3. Navigate over to http://m.facebook.com/friends.php? (You’ll have to login)

4. Answer yes to the prompt and sit back – the script will move through your phonebook and eventually dump you a CSV of the results.

5. Copy/Paste the CSV wherever you want.

6. Un-install the Greasemonkey script.

So that’s it, one less walled garden to worry about. And hopefully one less “I lost my cellphone!” event/group on facebook!

The script:

Facebook Phonebook Exporter

Looks like someone at gmail forgot to make sure the system won’t display negative time for future timestamped emails. I’m not sure where/how this email got a bad timestamp but gmail is displaying it as being sent in the future!
See it!

One of our clients came to us a few days ago asking us if we could build something to aggregate several RSS feeds and then display it on their site.

Easy enough. Except the caveats were 1) This had to be done on a shoe string budget and 2) We had no permission to script on the server side (only client side scripting allowed kids).

We put our heads together and realized that Yahoo Pipes would provide the functionality to easily combine several RSS feeds, sort them, filter them, ect. And best part? It’s all built and all free. Pipes also provides the functionality to export a pipe as a JSON feed (as opposed to RSS).

So that takes care of problem 1 and almost fixes problem 2. Of course the remaining problem is getting around the cross domain XHR restrictions on the JSON. I did some poking around the Yahoo Pipes documentation and it turns out you can add a _callback parameter to the URL and bang it wraps the JSON in a JS callback!

Issues solved. The final part was to mix in a little jQuery to load the JSON+callback feed into a <script> tag and then display it.

Total lines of code: 27 lines of javascript.

EDIT. Now with code!

sfWidgetjQueryTimepickr – Symfony timepickr widget

GIT Ignores and Symfony

Use Greasemonkey to extract your Facebook Phonebook

Gmail fail

Client side RSS aggregator