Web Development Magazine

September 21st, 2008

Developing Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers with PHP cURL

For a long time i wanted to write detailed tutorial on how to use PHP and cURL to create bots and i am still going to do that, but while browsing Amazon i found very interesting book related to this topic A Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL written by Mike Schrenk. I did not read this book yet, but it looks very promising and interesting … atleast to me, because it is not yet-another-php-for-beginners, but a book that focuses and deeply explores one single topic – creating webbots.

In my opinion knowing how to create web bots is one of the most important web programmer skills, there is so much data on the internet that we need bots to take full adventage of the resources on the web and automate day to day boring online tasks. More over you will be surprised how often you will be asked on job interview if you can write a webbot.

Posted in Reviews
By Greg

June 19th, 2008

Using PHP cURL to read RSS feed XML

I very rearly, use feeds, i prefer to go to my favourite website and see what is going on instead of downloading their content to my computer with some RSS reader. However the fact is feeds are getting popular and people are searching for a ways to access and easily automatically parse those feeds with PHP, and because RSS and ATOM are nothing more then XML documents then i have for you really simple way of handling those feeds which i want to share with you (thru my blog as well thru my blog feeds ).

Posted in PHP
By Greg