The /Dev/Hell podcast has posted the latest episode of their podcast (as hosted by Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) - Episode #29, "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions".

Being totally out of ideas, we turned things over to our legions of fans who joined us on IRC. Lots of interesting questions, and people learned what Ed thought was horseshit.

As you can imagine, there's lots of topics covered including some discussion of PHP IDEs, if PHP has reached its limit and liberal versus conservative programmers. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

In PHPMaster.com's latest tutorial Lukas White introduces you to using the Yahoo "Placemaker" web service to geographically locate a place from a free-form text string. The results include "place details" like the type of the location, latitude, longitude and how confident they are in their match.

The challenge then is to do two things: work out what place you could be talking about, disambiguate if necessary, and then identify exactly where on Earth that is. That's what I'll show you how to do in this article; by using a freely available web service, we’ll write a simple program to ask users where they are (and ask them to clarify if necessary) before identifying their responses in concrete terms.

He shows how to make a request to the Placemaker web service, passing it a string coming from the user, to be located. The POST request contains a few pieces of data including an application ID , your desired output type and the language you're using for the input. His example code uses curl to make the request and handles it (the XML response at least) with a call to simplexml_load_string.

On the php|architect site today Chris Tankersley has a new tutorial about geocoding, Finding Exactly Where You Are - a guide to integrating the Yahoo! Placefinder service into your application.

Yahoo! PlaceFinder is a REST web service that will turn an address into the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates in XML, JSON, or serialized PHP objects. It has a few other functions too, like finding the nearest airport, time zone, and even telephone area code. [...] PlaceFinder is a very simple REST service, so cURL is a quick and easy way to access it. There are no authentication tokens to deal with or logon procedures. Just send a GET request, and read the response.

He links you to the service to get an API key and includes a simple class (PlaceFinderAPI) that builds the GET query for you and makes the request via curl. Also included is an example showing how to find a given location (coincidentally, his location choice is the hotel where the php|tek conferences are held).

During some of his work with the Yahoo! Search Boss API, Till Klampaeckel came across an issue with the OAuth connection causing an error of "oauth_problem=consumer_key_rejected" with his Zend Framework-based application.

The above process doesn't even take five minutes, but then I spent eight hours figuring out what oauth_problem=consumer_key_rejected means. Spent a couple hours googling, reading bug reports and even posted to the Yahoo! group associated with Search Boss. To cut to the chase: When you create a new project, it's not sufficient to just activate "Yahoo! Search Boss" (and provide billing details and so on).

His real issue was because of how Yahoo! apparently creates (or when they create) the OAuth connection information for you. He gives a two line example of how the Zend Framework can grab a OAuth token with Zend_Oauth. He goes on to talk about the OAuth implementation in PHP and how it's "pretty sucky" and that there's not much documentation around to help. He got things working, though, and included the sample code he used to make the connection - pulling the info from a an oauth.ini file, pushing the authentication parameters to the remote side, grabbing the headers and making the HTTP request with the OAuth information in place.

Lorna Mitchell has posted about her experiences with getting OAuth working with her PHP application by way of the PECL package that adds support into PHP.

I've been looking into OAuth recently and really like what I see, so I started looking at actually starting to play with something that uses it (and isn't twitter). In the pursuit of this, I spent some time walking through the process of how to actually authenticate using OAuth, as a client.

She briefly touches on the consumer key and secret and how those are passed along with the OAuth object creation to grab a request token, complete with details on setting a callback. She also mentions how to grab an access token - a piece of information you include in your API calls to let the remote service know who you are. All of her examples are using Yahoo! OAuth services.

On the Ibuildings techPortal there's a new post with the latest episode of their Dutch PHP Conference sessions (from 2009's event) - Dustin Whittle's talk on open source at Yahoo.

Join us for a case study on using open source tools to build a platform for enterprise web applications. Find out what worked and what didn't when building scalable web applications with open source tools (apache, php/apc, mysql, memcache, symfony, yui). Learn how you can tools Yahoo! offers for developers and how your team can leverage Yahoo's Open Stack for your next web project. We will examine the components that make up Yahoo's open stack: developer tools (YUI), data APIs (YQL), and the application platform (YAP).

You can either listen to this latest episode on the in-page player or you can download the mp3 directly from Ibuildings and listen at your leisure. You can also find his slides for the presentation here.

Alfonso Jimenez has posted a tutorial on how to tie the Yahoo r3 service for internationalizing your applications with the Phing build tool.

[Yahoo r3] offers a neat and powerful command line interface which will make your life easier. It can also be managed by using a web interface. [...] So after far too much research, we came up with Yahoo r3, but we still had an itch to scratch: how can we integrate this into our continuous integration workflow? We are using Phing (and Java Ant) for building our sites, so it was nice to have some Phing tasks to work with r3.

He includes two custom Phing tasks for interfacing with the command line Yahoo r3 client - one for project generation and the other to set variables in the process. A sample build file putting them to use is also included.

On the PHPClasses.org blog Manuel Lemos has a recent post looking at a method for sending emails using a remote SMTP server (like Google or Yahoo's) via this package.

In most hosting environments, the PHP mail() function is sufficient to send e-mail messages without problems. However, there are situations on which using the mail function is inconvenient and may prevent that your messages reach the destination. [...] Therefore, you may need to find an alternative way for sending your e-mail messages from PHP.

The package lets you define a username/password, server, whether to use a SSL connection or not, and if the connection needs to use the TLS protocol.

On the CSS-Tricks.com site today there's a quick tutorial on changing up the look and feel of your site based on an external source. More specifically, they give the example of updating the graphics of your site depending on the weather in your area via PHP and CSS.

Using a little magic and trickery (read: PHP and CSS), we can change the appearance of a website automatically based on the weather outside, in real time! In the example site we have created, the header graphic will change to one of four different styles based on Sunny, Rain, Snow, and Cloudy.

Their example makes a request to the Yahoo! weather data for a location and brings it in to PHP where the XML is parsed (via a regular expression) and the current conditions are parsed out. This condition is then passed out into the page as the class type on the header and, based on the CSS already defined, the correct image is pulled in as the background.

In Matt Curry's most recent blog entry he looks at the creation of a CakePHP plugin that integrates Yahoo! Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) into an application.

I mention that Neil’s code would make a really cool plugin. This sparked a discussion as to whether this was possible with Cake’s current plugin architecture. The issues where: how to get the datasource configuration, which would normally go in /app/config/database.php, how to reference the datasource class itself and how to handle the custom route.

The created the plugin with a ConnectionManager instance that goes out and loads in a configuration file inside of his search model in his application.