First, while I love people, I cannot hang out with anyone for very long. This isn’t to say that I don’t love my friends who I hung out with at SXSW. I have some amazing friends, who likely saw an uglier side of me in Texas. That’s a shame, and I cannot express my apologies to them enough.

Second, celebrity fawning is just as much of an issue in tech circles as it is anywhere else. The very things I despise about Hollywood culture are very prevalent in the Valley culture as well. Anyone that knows me, knows how I absolutely despise treating people as anything more than that.

A funny thing happened while I was there however.

I sat in one of the last talks of the conference. When it was over I got up to collect my stuff to leave. I noticed someone collecting themselves behind me. It was Matt Cutts. For those of you who don’t know who Matt Cutts is, he’s the head of Google’s web spam team. He’s directly responsible for helping ensure the links you click on Google’s search results are valid.

I was completely star struck.

Matt was awesome. He’s a very level-headed, clean, nice guy. He even gave me a few breath mints (maybe I needed them). He even uses a PC (whoa). After a few minutes of chatting about relevant search results in google, and keeping the results clean (when desired), he went on to talk to some other people.

The absence made me realize, that for as much as I hated people worshiping other people, I was doing it too. Matt Cutts represents a guy who does things that I admire, and hope to imitate. I suspect other people fawn over folks they feel the same about.

So, I’d like to publicly apologize for being rude to some folks on twitter, and (more importantly) to my friends who tolerated me at SXSW. I had a great time, and it was better because all of you who were with me. It just took me a while to realize it. To those of you who were there: I was a big bag of douche, and I appreciate your ability to let me figure it out myself.

I’d like to recap all of SXSW, but it’d take weeks for me to write it and days for you to read it. I’ll just go on a rant about some of the other folks I met while I was there (Besides the awe-inspiring super-duper Matt Cutts). I’m horrible at remembering names (and I was drunk a lot), so if I butcher your name, _please_ forgive me.

The first night, I went out on my own. I saw Ted, then went to a bar off 6th st. Later, I was able to hang out with the Blogsmith guys (Plus the always awesome Erik Hersman). Gavin, Mike, Krystoff, and Bill were all a blast to hang out with and share a few 7&7s with. We had Thai and saw a burlesque show at Emos. Some of those girls had more hair on their armpits than me.

The next night Eric, Ryan, (who I shared a hotel room with) and me hung out at Gingerman. Gingerman is a story by itself (it has Old Rasputin Stout on tap). While we were hanging out, we met some of the guys and girls from Agency Net. I’m from West Palm, which is about 35 miles north of Ft. Lauderdale, where Agency Net calls home. Nini was taking pictures and hanging out with Larissa, while Augustin, Chris, and I talked about comic books and Death Metal.

The same night, Ryan and I went to the official opening party (Eric went back to the hotel, sick), and met the rest of the Ushahidi guys. David, Teddy, Erik (Hersman, same as above), Jon, and Kofi were all at the party, and it was awesome to meet them. They are likely some of the coolest people I met the entire time was in Austin (sorry to everyone else, but those guys are pretty awesome). They (minus Kofi) did a panel talk on web apps in emerging markets. One of the things I’m most certain about right now, is how much I intend to get involved with Ushahidi. Awesome stuff.

On Sunday, Alex cued me in on a conservative meetup at Moonshine, ‘Right-By-Southwest’. The event was put on by by Patrick Ruffini, on behalf of Michael Williams. Some of the awesome folks I met: Pat, Ned, Joe, and Robbie were all awesome to talk to and hang with. Hearing Michael Williams talk about his experiences in the mis-named Texas Railway Authority was awesome. Some people exude a sense of awesome, and Mr. Williams is definitely one of those guys.

Somewhere in-between all this, I met some other folks. I don’t remember when, or how but I recall meeting Vladimir, Billy, Todd, and Seth.

Also in between all of this was BarCamp Miami. I definitely love a BarCamp, and this was definitely the craziest BarCamp I have ever seen. Eric, Erik, and Ryan presented (all in different rooms). Good times there. The were even handing out free burritos. I expected the burritos to suck (free, right), but they were freakin awesome.

Monday, we had the Florida Creatives meetup at Gingerman (that place is awesome). Erik, Alex, Eric, Mark, Ryan, Etan, and a few others (bad with names, sorry) all hung out for a few hours to continue the tradition we’ve kept for years now. It was good to have a little home nostalgia over a thousand miles away from home. I’d met Mark Jaquith before, but never had much chance to talk. It was cool to talk about some non-tech stuff with someone who I respect a bunch. I got too drunk that night, and punched a parking meter. While my hand is still bruised, I’ll bet that parking meter will think twice.

Tuesday was the final day of the conference. I met some cool guys from YNot, presenting on a panel about how to make money in the adult industry. The lessons were pretty typical actually. Meet people, build trust, don’t suck. Afterwards I went to the finale party. I don’t remember the name of the place, but I do recall it had a mechanical bull.

I saw Vishal there with a very pretty friend of his (whose name I do not recall). I met Vishal at FOWA, and he’s a pretty awesome guy. His friend was pushing PR for New Orleans. I mentioned she had work left to be done. She agreed, but had me swear I’d be an evangelist for New Orleans. So, here I am …

After that I hung with Teddy and Jon the rest of the night. I said it before, but those guys really are awesome.

The next day I came home. I was hungover (from drinking) and sick (from Ryan). My plane was delayed for hours. I’m pretty happy to be home, but I’m happier that I went to South By Southwest

The first thing I did, to filter input, was to setup a Google Reader account for Florida Death Metal. At least this allowed me to see updates from a variety of other sites in a single place. This also allows me to search through those new listings for keywords to bands and events I think are important to know about.

This still requires me to visit Google Reader, and parse through a lot of stuff (routinely over 1000 new items) to find out what’s going on in the world. The real dilemma I was having, was trying to implement an active alert system to news going on around me. The active part, was me actively searching through Google Reader for information relevant to Florida Death Metal. 

Needless to say, this started to suck. I have a great full time job, a wonderful wife, and a million other things I like to do with my spare time. Spending my days and nights on Google Reader, struggling to keep up with news for a project blew.

I love Florida Death Metal. I’ve never been involved in something that means so much to me. However, there are only so many days in the week, and so much time in each of those days. I need a way to passively keep up with relevant news and events. I needed some automation, so I could spend time hanging drapes for Melissa, or having a beer with Rob.

Enter Zend_Http_Client ….

One of my favorite programming tricks is breaking down requests to servers, and finding a way to do them programatically. So, I got to thinking about how I could parse through all of my stuff in Google Reader. For each of the views in Google Reader, there is an associated RSS feed. Well, that makes things simple enough. I could just grab the RSS feed and parse it. 

One minor detail, the RSS feeds aren’t publicly available. You have to be logged in to use them. This makes sense. I imagine Google doesn’t want to be used as an aggregator of RSS feeds to be used as a proxy to other sites. Sorry :/

So, here’s a breakdown of what I needed to write a script to do:

1. Login to Google
2. Grab the RSS Feed for ‘All Items’
3. Parse the RSS Feed for keywords relevant to Florida Death Metal
4. Email me alerts (if there are matches)

Not too bad. So, Here’s the script I came up with. I hope you like it :

 
<?php
/*
Description: Script to parse through a google reader aggregation of content for keywords
Version: 1.0
Author: Cory Collier
Author URI: http://corycollier.com/
*/
 
//Define the constants required for the script
define('GOOGLE_PASSWORD', 	'<your password here>');
define('GOOGLE_RSS_URI', 		'<the url for your google reader rss feed>');
define('GOOGLE_LOGIN_URI',		'https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginAuth?service=reader');
define('GOOGLE_LOGIN_EMAIL', 	'<your gmail account username / email>');
define('MAILER_FROM_ADDR',		'<where the email should come from>');
define('MAILER_TO_ADDR',		'<where the email should go to>');
define('MAILER_SUBJECT',		'Google Reader Parsing');
 
/*
* a Zend Framework Installation _MUST_ be located on the include path for PHP
*/
require 'Zend/Loader.php';
Zend_Loader::registerAutoload();
 
//Instantiate a new Zend_Http_Client, with the google login url
$client = new Zend_Http_Client(GOOGLE_LOGIN_URI);
 
/*
 * Set the client cookie jar ...
 * Set the method to POST ..
 * Set the parameters to post with
 */
$client->setCookieJar()
	->setMethod(Zend_Http_Client::POST)
	->setParameterPost(array(
		'continue'		=> GOOGLE_RSS_URI,
		'service'		=> 'reader',
		'niu'			=> 1,
		'hl'			=> 'en', 
		'Email'		=> GOOGLE_LOGIN_EMAIL,
		'Passwd'		=> GOOGLE_PASSWORD,
		'PersistentCookie'	=> 'yes',
		'asts'			=> ''
));
 
//make the login request, and store the response in the $response variable ...
$response = $client->request('POST');
 
//If the response was successful, change the uri value for the client object
// to the appropriate rss file for parsing
$client->setUri(GOOGLE_RSS_URI)
 
		//Change the request method to GET
		->setMethod(Zend_Http_Client::GET); 
 
//send the request, and store the results of it
$response = $client->request();
 
//Initialize an array of keywords to look for
$keywords = array (
	//Whatever your keywords are you're looking for
);
 
//SimpleXML is great!
$sx = simplexml_load_string ($response->getBody());
 
//Iterate through each of the retrieved entries
foreach ($sx->entry as $entry ) 
{	//Now, iterate through each of the defined keywords / keyphrases
    foreach ( $keywords as $keyword ) 
    {	//First, check to see if the title contains a keyword / keyphrase
        if ( stristr((string)$entry->title, $keyword) ) 
        {	//Append any matches to the matches arrays
            $matches[] = (string)$entry->link['href'];
        }
    	//Next, check to see if there are any matches in the summary
        if ( stristr((string)$entry->summary, $keyword) ) 
        {	//same deal: If there are matches, add them to the stack
            $matches[] = (string)$entry->link['href'];
        }
    } //END keyword iteration
 
} // END posting iteration
 
//IF matches were found, send an email
if(count($matches)) 
{	//Initialize a variable to store a mesage in
    $message = '';
 
    //Iterate through each of the matches
    foreach($matches as $match)
    {	//For each of the matches, append them to the message string, separated 
    	// by newlines
        $message .= "\n" .  $match;  
    }
    //Initialize a new Zend_Mail object 
    $mail = new Zend_Mail;
 
    //Set the parameters necessary to send a message 
    $mail->addTo(MAILER_TO_ADDR)
        ->setFrom(MAILER_FROM_ADDR)
        ->setSubject(MAILER_SUBJECT)
        ->setBodyText($message);
 
    //I never trust email, so wrap the email execution in a try/catch statement
    try  
    {	//Send the mail
        $mail->send();   
    } catch (Exception $e ){
        //Do something here
    }
}

Wrapping all of this up, I stuck this script on a spare debian box at my house, and setup a cronjob to run the script every 15 minutes. It saves me a lot of time. I’d love to hear some feedback from y’all about how I got this done. I’m a script guy at heart. So, this stuff is super fun for me.

Wrapping all of this up, I stuck this script on a spare debian box at my house, and setup a cronjob to run the script every 15 minutes. It saves me a lot of time. I'd love to hear some feedback from y'all about how I got this done. I'm a script guy at heart. So, this stuff is super fun for me.

I know I should have checked the success of the initial login attempt before assuming the second request would get anything at all. Keep in mind though, this is a script I use to make my own life easier. Exceptions being thrown here cause me no harm. If I don't get anything, I can check my error logs for issues. Not a perfect solution, but it's working pretty well for me now.

Sound too good to be true? It’s available to you right now. Thanks god, errr…. google…..

Get Google To Store All Your Email

First, login to gmail (yeah, you have to login first :/ ). Next, find the ‘Settings’ link in the top right of your browser.

Once you’ve clicked on that, you’ll see the settings page, with some options in the top. You’ll want to click the ‘Accounts’ link in the top left

After you’ve gotten there, notice the region (towards the bottom of the page) that says ‘Get mail from other accounts’.

This is where you’ll add email accounts from. Go ahead and click the ‘Add account’ link. After you do this, you should be presented with a pop-up window that will ask you for the email address you wish to replicate on google. It looks like this:

Go ahead and enter whatever email address you want to use, and click ‘Next Step’. After you’ve gotten that accomplished, you’ll be presented with something slightly more involved. Don’t worry it’s not too tough to get through.

So, the first thing you enter is your username. Most of the time, that will be your full email address. Your password is, well, your password. The POP server is something for you to figure out. Usually, it’s mail.your-domain.com. So, if your email address is joeballs@physics.org, then the POP server is probably mail.physics.org. Sometimes it’s pop.physics.org, or pop3.physics.org.

Anyways, once you figure that out, and get it in there, you have a few choices to make.

The checkbox that allows you to leave a copy of the retrieved message on the server can be important. I think I speak for sys admins accross the internet when I say ‘Dont check this box!’. The reason: if you leave this box unchecked, google will remove a message from your server once google downloads it. That’s great for disk space, and since google seems to be growing hard drives on trees, they might as well do all the storing.

The next option you have, is to use SSL when connecting to your POP server. If your POP server supports this option, do it. While it’s not likely, it is possible for someone to see your emails as Google downloads them from your mail server. Since e-mail is usually personal, you probably don’t want this to happen.

After that, there’s the option to label incoming messages. I really recommend you do this, especially if you’re using more than one email account here. It really helps to distinguish which email was sent to which address.

Finally, you have the option to Archive incoming messages, so they never hit your inbox. I never use this option, so I can’t really speak to why you’d want to. I’m sure some of you have a reason, so try that one at your own leisure.

Get Google To Send Mail For You

Having Google store all of your mail is only half the battle. The next part, is having google send mail for you too. Back in the ‘Accounts’ tab of the ‘Settings’ page, find the area for ‘Send mail as:’

You have the option to add an email address here. Go ahead and click this. Once you do, another pop-up window will appear that will look like this:

You’ll be prompted for your name and email address. You even have the option to specifiy a different reply-to email address. Go ahead and fill those 2 fields out, then click ‘Next Step’. Then, you’ll be presented with another window :

This is a prompt to let you know an email will be sent to the email address you’re trying to send as. This helps prevent other people from sending mail on your behalf without you knowing about it. Go ahead and click the ‘Send Verification’ button. Google will now send you an email verifying that you actually have a right to send mail as that email. When you get the email, click the link in it, and you’re done.

Wrapping Up …

Google has an awesome ability to filter spam and viruses from email. Using Gmail as a proxy for your email cuts down on the spam you recieve, and the likelyhood you’ll get a virus from your buddy. Even better, you get to use gmail’s awesome web interface for all of your email.

Currently Gmail supports IMAP integration as well, so your email client (or iPhone) can use IMAP to replicate folders (labels) in GMail. I’ve heard that’s a little buggy right now, but I’m sure fixes are on the way.

I’m flattered. I guess that means I can’t keep talking trash about the french!

The official story is the data isn’t lost. It’s still being collected. It’s just taking a while for google to fix their issue and get the recent traffic data out to the public.

The exact cause of the outage has yet to be released. However, there is a lot of speculation that it’s due to the ‘upgrade’ that the reporting service received in May. That upgrade caused a similar, but less severe outage, back then as well.

There’s a good thread going about this here