idProjections.com

Text Message Marketing Request

Kyle — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 18:26:16 +0000

I am thinking about a project. But I need your help! I need the API for as many aggregators as possible. I have emailed them all, but so far most are unresponsive. If you happen to have any information on some companies, it would be very helpful.
I still need APIs from companies like :
http://www.slingermobile.com/
http://www.rhbrands.com/
http://www.messagebuzz.com/
http://www.cellitmarketing.com/
http://www.promotxt.com/
http://www.clubtexting.com/

And I am sure there are tons others, but it would helpful to get these for a start…

Timed Image Rotator

Kyle — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 20:18:03 +0000

I was working on a project a while back and I ran across a really neat blog. I wish I could remember the link to the site as I would gladly give credit to where my idea came from. I will edit this if I run across it again.

Anyway, he had a picture of his parent’s farm that would change according to not only the time of day, but the current weather. He didn’t want to share his code with the public as I am sure it took quit a while to produce so I can understand, but I liked the concept and wanted to use it.

I was soon given a project where I could use a technique like that - Charlies Farm and Home - so I began working on it.

Now, there are many different ways to have done this, but I decided I wanted it to work on the user’s end, so that the user would get an image depicting the time of day it currently was at their house. Obviously, since it was going to be a client side appication, I am going to use JavaScript to accomplish the task.

First off, we are going to create the XHTML document that we are going to use. Now, I am a big fan of writing my XHTML semantically, so I am going to be using the

tag for my header and then doing a quick image replacement technique, so that the header is not only SEO friendly, but usable by those with disabilities and users will even have a fall back in case JavaScript is disabled on their browser.

Let’s start with a really basic XHTML document.


<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Site Title</title>
</head>
 
<body>
<h1>Site or Page Title</h1>
</body>
</html>

After we get the basics done, we can throw in a little CSS. We will wrap the text inside the

tag with a span and then we will use CSS to hide the text from browsers with CSS enabled and we will show them an image in it’s place. This will be the default image that users with JavaScript disabled will see.


<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Site Title</title>
<style type="text/css">
h1 {
  background: #000 url(../image/directory/1.jpg) no-repeat left top;
  width: 801px;
  height: 241px;
}
h1 span {
  display: none;
}
</style>
</head>
 
<body>
<h1><span>Site or Page Title</span></h1>
</body>
</html>

Now, let’s take a look at the the JavaScript we are going to use to grab the images…

function getIMG()
{
 datetoday = new Date();
 timenow=datetoday.getTime();
 datetoday.setTime(timenow);
 thehour = datetoday.getHours();
 
 if (thehour > 22)
  display = "../image/directory/1.jpg";
 else if (thehour > 18)
  display = "../image/directory/2.jpg";
 else if (thehour > 8)
  display = "../image/directory/3.jpg";
 else if (thehour > 5)
  display = "../image/directory/4.jpg";
 else if (thehour > 1)
  display = "../image/directory/1.jpg";
 else
  display = "../image/directory/1.jpg";
 
 var image = '<';  image+='img alt="" src=../image/directory/' + display + ' /';  image+='>';
 
 document.write(image);
}

We will add a call to the JavaScript in the HTML and then add the call to grab the image that the JavaScript chooses.


<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Site Title</title>
<script src="rotator.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<style type="text/css">
h1 {
  background: #000 url(../image/directory/1.jpg) no-repeat left top;
  width: 801px;
  height: 241px;
}
h1 span {
  display: none;
}
</style>
</head>
 
<body>
<h1><span>Site or Page Title</span><script type="text/javascript">getIMG();</script></h1>
</body>
</html>

That’s pretty much it. You’ll need to edit the size of the image in the CSS for the

tag and you will need to specify the path to your image directory in the JavaScript and of course make sure all the images are named correctly.

Feel free to comment if you have any suggestions or questions, I will work on a jQuery version of this one of these days and post it.

Easy Way to Log Referral IDs with PHP

Kyle — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:19:48 +0000

I figured if I am going to have a blog on this site, I might as well post something informational and hopefully useful to someone so I wrote up this little diddy.

So, I was working on a recent project and needed an easy way to track referral URL uses. They weren’t going to really be affiliates, but they got a small commission off of every sale they drove to the site… so ya, I guess it was like an affiliate tracker… but I just needed something quick and easy so I came up with this little script.

$urlParts = explode('.', $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
$referralID = $urlParts[0];
setcookie("site_referral", "" . $referralID . "", time()+7200, "/", "example.com");
header("Location: https://www.example.com/");

Basically, I gave each referrer a subdomain (http://referrer.example.com/) and then when the user goes to this subdomain your site will grab the URL and break it into three parts via the explode function. It will then grab the first part, which is obviously the referral’s ID you gave them.

It will then write that to a cookie, or if you wanted a database, and then it redirects the user to the homepage of your site like nothing ever happened.

I set the cookie so that I could pass it around a few times, but you could replace the setcookie function with something like this.

$referralSet = mysql_query("SELECT referral FROM referralLogs WHERE referral=\"$referralID\"");
if($referralSet != $referralID {
mysql_query("INSERT INTO referralLogs SET referral=\"$referralID\"") or die(mysql_error());
}
$referralCounter = mysql_query("SELECT counter FROM referralLogs WHERE referral=\"$referralID\" LIMIT 1");
$referralCounter++;
$referralUpdate = mysql_query("UPDATE referralLogs WHERE referral=\"$referral\" SET count=\"$referralCounter\"");

I didn’t use this exact code, but I think it is valid. This should check to see if you already have the current referral code in your database and if not, add it. Then it will grab the counter from the database and increase the count by one.

If you run into any errors, with it, feel free to post a comment below and I will try and help out!

Turkey Dais!

Kyle — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 21:46:41 +0000

Turkey, Bud-Light, Familia, and more Bud-Light… Gotta love the holidays!

I ate too much at my family’s house and then ended up heading over to my wife’s family’s house and ate even more.

Today is the celebration of my new site going live and I have high hopes that someday people will have a reason to stop in! Until then I will sit here and talk to myself…

Hello Inter-tubes!

Kyle — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 05:27:51 +0000

Welcome to the NEW idProjections.com!

My name is Kyle and I fancy myself a Web Developer of sorts. I am a freelance coder out of St. Louis, MO. I plan on keeping this site up-to-date with my latest projects and my pieces of code that I might find interesting.

This is my first blog so we will see how this goes!

I enjoy coding in CSS, XHTML, PHP, MySQL, jQuery, and plan on learning Ruby on Rails here one of these days! I enjoy spending time on CSSCreator.com trying to help out other CSS coders and receiving some help there myself whenever I run into a wall.

If you have any questions about anything that I post on here please feel free to post a comment and hopefully I will be able to help out or if I happen to get two readers, someone else will be able to come along and help out.