It’s been forever since I’ve used PHP, probably 1.5 years now. I’ve been relearning it this week for a website I am making. With this computer business I’ll be doing a little bit of website stuff as well. Definitely not focusing on it, but it’s available. Relearning PHP is weird. I’ve still got parts of it in my mind, but I keep making stupid mistakes and forgetting functions. It’s not that much of a site, but it is involved enough to make it a little hard. I’m about 50% done with the coding of it right now. Just a couple more things to add and it will be ready for testing.

IZEA just made their IZEARanks website live, and it includes an API so you can use the data however you want to.

I’m not too good at programming, but I combined a few things and made a simple button to display your RealRank on your website. It will look something like this:

If you want to use this, all you need is the one PHP file. Download it here

Once you’ve done that, open it up in a text editor like notepad and edit in your domain name and your API key. You can get your API key from your account page on IZEARanks. You also need to enter the path to the image file you want it to create. Then upload it to your server.

You will need to go to your hosting control panel and add a cron job. You will want this cron to run every day at about 3 AM EST (I believe the rank is updated about 2 AM). The line would look something like this:
0 3 * * * php -q /home/user/public_html/realrank/realrank.php

I think you also need to make the folder where the image will go writeable. I am not too sure because i am on a different kind of server than normal.

Once you’ve done that, go ahead and visit the realrank.php file you just uploaded so it will create the image (It will update after that by the cron job). Then link to the image like this:
<a href="http://izearanks.com/sites/yourdomain-com"><img src="rank/realrank.gif" width="80" height="15" alt="RealRank" /><a>

And it should show up. Let me know if you have any questions. This isn’t perfect, and I’m not the best at programming, but it’s better than nothing.

I’m going to be looking into how to read XML a little more in PHP and hope to make it so you can show your average RealRank over a period of days (user defined). Maybe add the little lightbulb for IZEA as well. and anything anybody else things of.

I am going through right now and trying to line out what I want with Sammiching. I really wish I knew more programming stuff, I just haven’t done it in forever so I’ve forgotten almost everything. I want to do it, and get it all done fast but I know I won’t be able to.

Hopefully I can get this planned out, and then kind of get a basic structure of how the website will work. If I can do that then I can actually start coding some of the smaller things. It’s just that I have no idea where to start when planning out how the whole site will work.

If you know PHP or Ruby and want to help, it would be awesome. Sammiching is a website where you share sandwiches that you make or buy. It’s gonna be awesome.