Make Phone Calls with Code Using Twilio
Web applications are better than old school applications that get installed on your hard drive because you can access them from anywhere using the web. They do however suffer from the same limited communication channel as typical software because they can only interact with users via the computer. Users provide input via the keyboard and the app provides output via the screen. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could take advantage of other communication channels like phone and text messages to communicate with our users? Well now we can with the help of Twilio. In this post I’ll walk you through building an application that can make phone calls and send text messages using the Twilio API.
How-to Ensure a Secure Connection Using PHP
Image via Wikipedia When submitting sensitive information over the web it’s important to ensure that the requested page is being accessed via an HTTPS encrypted connection. I’ve come across some forms that don’t check whether a secure connection has been made or not. In other words, you can delete the S from HTTP and instead of redirecting the user back to the HTTPS connection the form is just displayed unsecured. This is a BIG NO NO… as a programmer you cannot rely on the visitor, or even other developers who would be linking to the form, to request a form securely. In this post I will review how you can ensure that your users are accessing certain pages using a secure connection.
Implementing Facebook Connect (Part 3) – Accessing Data from Facebook
About a month ago I posted a continuation of my Implementing Facebook Connect series on how to establish a connection to Facebook. In this post I am going to look at using that connection we established to access user data and render it on a page.
Selling Campaign Monitor to Your Customers
I am a big fan of the e-mail marketing app Campaign Monitor (CM) as you can see in my recent post 10 Reasons Why Campaign Monitor Rocks. Shortly after writing that post I decided to try and introduce CM to my users and see if I can sell them on the program. I developed a promotional site, I rebranded CM to match my chosen color scheme and logo and have started marketing it to my users. In this post I will outline why I choose to resell CM, what I did to get everything up and running and what my plans are for the future.
Implementing Facebook Connect (Part 2) – Establishing a Connection
Two weeks ago I took a look at Facebook Connect (FC) summarizing what it is and why developers would want to integrate it with their own applications in part 1 of this series. Originally I had thought this would be a two post topic but as I have learned more about FC I think it’s going to take a few posts to get up and running successfully. So, in this post we’re going to get all the pre-requisites out of the way and establish a connection with Facebook from our own application. We will then look at how we can do things with that connection in subsequent posts. Ready or not… let’s get started!
Implementing Facebook Connect (Part 1) – What is Facebook Connect?
Image via CrunchBase I have been spending some time recently developing an online community which will hopefully be launched next quarter. One of the things I wanted to integrate is OpenID to try and lessen the burden of signing-up and logging-in. However, after doing some research I’m thinking that Facebook Connect might be the better way to go. This is the first of at least 2 posts about implementing Facebook Connect with your own PHP application. To begin we will first look at what Facebook Connect is and does and the next post will get technical and look at how to integrate it with your next CodeIgniter or PHP application.
Customizing Domains With Wildcard DNS
It seems to be the “in” feature of most modern web apps today. Giving your users the ability to create a custom URL that they can use to access their account like http://chickenbbq.sign-up-sheet.com. From a feature stand point its nice because it’s another way users can customize your app to their specifications. From a developers perspective however it can be a bit challenging to implement if you don’t know what your doing.
How to use reCAPTCHA with CI
Image by mathowie via Flickr SPAM… a nasty little four letter word. Could mean tasty meat in a can or could mean junk e-mails and form submissions clogging your server and taking up space in your inbox. We are all familiar with it and are engaged in a constant battle to stop it. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to implement a popular 3rd party CAPTCHA service with your CodeIgniter application.
Generating PDF files using CodeIgniter
PDF files rock! Some of the programs used to view them could use some work, but the file format itself is real handy. As a programmer I have found PDF’s to be most helpful when generating reports that need to be printable. I know we are all supposed to be doing our part to make our offices “greener” and use less resources like paper. But some things just need to be printed (especially when your talking about the financial and legal industries). When generating reports in PDF format you suddenly have a lot more control over layout and design than you do with plain old HTML and CSS (although much progress is being made with print style sheets). You can create some really nice reports on the fly that your users can view, save for later or e-mail to their co-workers for review. In this post I will show you how I generate PDF reports using CodeIgniter.
Who is Chris Monnat?
Chris Monnat (aka mrtopher) is a web application developer and entrepreneur located in Alexandria, VA. This site is his island of information where he blogs about CodeIgniter, PHP programming, business topics, the Internet as a whole and other miscellaneous bits and bytes.
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