Download Link: PDF Editor Setup

Jake

Alright, for the novices out there, I suggest you read my article on how the internet works before we begin and the first few pages of w3 school’s html tutorial.

Alright, lets begin. Scraping involves several steps:

1. Downloading the contents of the other page
2. Interpreting/Reading the other page
3. (Possibly) Using information gained to go back to #1

For example, Google “spiders” through every page on the internet. How does it do this? Well, it follows the steps above and, in number 2, it searches for “links” within each page and then uses those links to loop back to number one. Simple, right?

Alright, so lets pick a site that we want to scrape. How about we scrape tutorials off from w3schools. Below is the contents of http://www.w3schools.com/ in plain html code. To view this, go to http://www.w3schools.com/ and then click view->source in your browser. (The verbiage is a little different in each browser, but same basic idea). I have chosen to not only show the html code that interests us by searching for the specific html code that we want to read first.

Alright, so upon basic analysis, what do we find? Well, this portion of code STARTS with “<td id=”leftcolumn” width=”150″ valign=”top” align=”left” style=”padding:4px;border:none”>” and ends with “<table border=”0″ width=”100%” cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”0″>“. So, if we wanted to “grab” this section of html code from the whole of the site, then we’d be all set.

Alright, so lets go back to our steps again.

1. Downloading the contents of the other page
2. Interpreting/Reading the other page

Downloading the contents of the other page in PHP is easy. We can just use the file_get_contents function like this:

$pagecontents = file_get_contents("http://www.w3schools.com/");

The above code assigns the php variable $pagecontents the contents of w3schools.com (in html, of course).

Now, we need to “grab” the html code of interest. To do this, we need to write a function that can search for the “start”, the “end” and then grab what is in between. Here is a php function that does just that:

function getBetween($str, $start, $end, $searchpos=0) {
$startpos = strpos($str, $start, $searchpos);
if ($startpos === false) return ""; // didn't find start
$endpos = strpos($str, $end, $startpos + strlen($start));
if ($endpos === false) return ""; // didn't find end
return substr($str, $startpos + strlen($start), ($endpos - $startpos - strlen($start)));
}

So, to wrap it all up, we’ve learned how to download a list of the tutorials on w3schools.com. This is hardly a complete project, as you could continue to loop through each “individual” link by searching for things between “<a” and “</a>”, but this is a great start! The complete code is below.

<?php

function getBetween($str, $start, $end, $searchpos=0) {
$startpos = strpos($str, $start, $searchpos);
if ($startpos === false) return ""; // didn't find start
$endpos = strpos($str, $end, $startpos + strlen($start));
if ($endpos === false) return ""; // didn't find end
return substr($str, $startpos + strlen($start), ($endpos - $startpos - strlen
($start)));
}

$pagecontents = file_get_contents("http://w3schools.com/");
$part = getBetween($pagecontents, '<td id="leftcolumn" width="150" valign="top" align="left" style="padding:4px;border:none">', '<table border="0" width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">');

- Jacob Beasley

Needless to say, this is problematic. In short, don’t use this software. Compared to its competitors, it is overpriced, and they nickel and dime you on everything. For example, the software uses ffmpeg and a number of other underlying opensource video libraries. They attempt to sell you software to install these libraries (http://www.sharemixer.com/setup-software). Talk about crappy service! For over $1000 for the core product, installation should be provided!

Anyways, we are considering switching web hosting to vps.net soon and, in the meantime, are just trying to get a fundraising system built in order to begin working with schools. It is exciting.

Now, I don’t want to be all negative on Sharemixer. It does do some things right. It uses smarty templates, so it was pretty easy to upgrade the template (had my team get something together in just a couple weeks). It uses PHP/MySQL and lets you know what video libraries to install, so we should not have any trouble moving to a VPS and expanding as needed. It does support most video formats, though its verbiage on every page needs to be changed (was meant for an adult site… had to modify the verbiage to fit a site for youth). All in all, we’ve made it work, but it would have been faster to use a more developed, cleaner system. See my other articles on related subjects and you’ll find a couple other video systems that are far more robust.

In short, here is what I have had developed for them (on top of Sharemixer):

1. An organization management system that links organizations/schools to categories
2. A fundraising system where each organization can have a number of fundraising groups (ex: different sports programs) and each group can have a number of kids.
3. Kids can raise fundraising support and a decent portion is given back to the school.
4. developing: automated online registration system with videos and the ability for kids to tag themselves in videos and for supporters to subscribe to weekly email updates on what videos the athletes were tagged in.
5. developing: fully integrated ticketing system
6. (and we did other things, but this is the revenue-generating portion)

Clip-Share

http://www.clip-share.com/

A commercial, opensource PHP/MySQL system. It is tops: bug-free, fast, and full-featured. Only downside is that it costs money. Their provided web hosting through the site is through a company that backs up everything once a week, so for the average mid-size company that is no big deal. May want to implement some kind of daily email mysql backup that shoots them an email with the database or something, just in case, but you generally should be fine. Their webhosting is DIRT CHEAP in terms of space/bandwidth. Free server install if you purchase hosting from clipshare.

PHPMotion

http://www.phpmotion.com/

A script similar to clip share but with less features. Thought technically free, costs money to remove the phpmotion logos. Server install is not free. All in all, not too much different from clipshare, except that most seem to think clipshare is better.

Elgg

http://elgg.org/

The premier, free social networking platform. Though not as full-featured as dolphin, it has a huge community of users. Checkout the site for more information. Entirely PHP/MySQL.

Dolphin

http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/

Without a doubt the most feature-rich and professional of any social networking tool out there. It is expensive, however, and requires its own VPS to run. Sort of the “facebook” of the group.

Ning

http://about.ning.com/product.php

A great tool. Really feels like a “myspace” clone. Check the site to learn more.

PHPBB

http://www.phpbb.com/
An industry standard forum system. Not a full “social networking” system, though.