Wow! eBook – Blog

Book Description

There’s a wealth of data online, but sorting and gathering it by hand can be tedious and time consuming. Rather than click through page after endless page, why not let bots do the work for you?

Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers will show you how to create simple programs with PHP/CURL to mine, parse, and archive online data to help you make informed decisions. Michael Schrenk, a highly regarded webbot developer, teaches you how to develop fault-tolerant designs, how best to launch and schedule the work of your bots, and how to create Internet agents that:

• Send email or SMS notifications to alert you to new information quickly
• Search different data sources and combine the results on one page, making the data easier to interpret and analyze
• Automate purchases, auction bids, and other online activities to save time

Sample projects for automating tasks like price monitoring and news aggregation will show you how to put the concepts you learn into practice.

This second edition of Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers includes tricks for dealing with sites that are resistant to crawling and scraping, writing stealthy webbots that mimic human search behavior, and using regular expressions to harvest specific data. As you discover the possibilities of web scraping, you’ll see how webbots can save you precious time and give you much greater control over the data available on the Web.

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Book Description

What would happen if you optimized a data store for the operations application developers actually use? You’d arrive at MongoDB, the reliable document-oriented database. With this concise guide, you’ll learn how to build elegant database applications with MongoDB and PHP.

Written by the Chief Solutions Architect at 10gen—the company that develops and supports this open source database—this book takes you through MongoDB basics such as queries, read-write operations, and administration, and then dives into MapReduce, sharding, and other advanced topics. Get out of the relational database rut, and take advantage of a high-performing system optimized for operations and scale.

• Learn step-by-step the tools you need to build PHP applications with MongoDB
• Perform Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations, and learn how to perform queries to retrieve data
• Administer your database, and access and manipulate data with the MongoDB Shell
• Use functions to work with sets, arrays, and multiple documents to perform synchronous, asynchronous, and atomic operations
• Discover PHP’s community tools and libraries, and why they’re valuable
• Work with regular expressions, aggregation, MapReduce, replication, and sharding

Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Why Mongo? Download Now »

Book Description

With this bundle you will master WordPress in no time. Three fresh eBooks contain Smashing Magazine’s best articles on WordPress, carefully prepared, edited and — of course — without advertising. “WordPress Essentials”, “Mastering WordPress” and “WordPress Tutorials” will surely come in handy. All eBooks are available in PDF, EPUB and MobiPocket formats. This bundle really gets your WordPress career started.

“WordPress Essentials” eBook (Techniques for Beginners) (164 pages)
If you want to find out how to extend the limitations of WordPress, this eBook for will help you improve your capabilities, so you can take full advantage of its flexibility. Learn how to build WordPress themes that sell, how to interact with the WordPress database, create a plugin, integrate Facebook with WordPress and use AJAX and HTML5 to produce engaging experience and maintainable code.

“Mastering WordPress” eBook (166 pages)
This eBook explains advanced methods and techniques which go beyond front-end experience and show how to customize back-end for your needs as well. You will learn the definitive guide to WordPress hooks and custom fields, power tips for WordPress template developers, tips for WordPress plugin developers and comprehensive introduction to advanced layout templates.

“WordPress Tutorials” eBook (183 pages)
This eBook is filled with detailed techniques Download Now »

Book Description

You can use the Drupal 7 content management system to build a small business website quickly. You may add blogs, images, maps, e-commerce, social application integration, and more to your site to connect with your customers and make more money from your business.

Drupal 7 Business Solutions will give you hands-on practical tutorials on how to build a rich and dynamic website for your business quickly using one of the most popular tools in open source.

You’ll start by adding blogs and images to your website. Then you’ll learn how to add a VIP section to your site so that you can give your logged in users special discounts and other VIP freebies. Next, you will learn to send your customers e-mail newsletters and show them a dynamic events calendar.

The book will then teach you to add e-commerce to your site so you can sell your products online. You’ll add YouTube videos and Google maps to help enhance your business site. You will then learn to incorporate feedback mechanisms for your customers.

The book also explains how to maintain your site, upgrade it, and continue adding dynamic content to it.

What you will learn from this book

• Install and set up Drupal
• Add blogs to attract customers to your business site
• Add customer accounts to your site Download Now »

Book Description

The greatest strength of Drupal lies in its design which, when employed correctly, allows developers to literally handcraft every aspect of a site, so that it looks and performs exactly how they want it to. While it is reasonably straightforward to download a Drupal theme and install it, doing anything beyond that is not. Using custom themes requires familiarity and experience with Drupal’s theming system, especially if you want to easily administer and maintain your themes.

Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook provides a plethora of recipes that enable Drupal template designers to make full use of its extensibility and style their site just the way they want it. It is a well-rounded guide which will allow users to take full advantage of Drupal’s theming system.

This cookbook starts with recipes which address the basics of Drupal’s theme system, including regions and blocks. It then moves on to advanced topics such as creating a custom theme and using it to modify the layout and style of content. With the introduction of the Field API and the growing importance of Views and Panels in Drupal 7, chapters have been dedicated to each feature. You will also learn many techniques for dealing with Drupal’s templating system, which will allow you create themes which surpass even the existing Drupal and contributed modules.

What you will learn from this book

• Improve your knowledge of the basics of Drupal theming such as installing and enabling a downloaded theme, changing the logo, and adding a slogan
• Customize the look of your website by configuring Download Now »

Book Description

WordPress makes the business of blogging easy. But there’s more to a successful business blog than just churning out posts. You need to understand the advanced marketing and promotion techniques to make your blog stand out from the crowd, attract visitors, benefit your brand, and deliver a worthwhile return on your investment.

WordPress 3 for Business Bloggers shows you how to use WordPress to run your business blog. It covers everything you need to develop a custom look for your blog, use analytics to understand your visitors, market your blog online, and foster connections with other bloggers to increase your traffic and the value of your blog.

You begin by identifying your blog’s strategic goals before going step-by-step through the advanced techniques that will grow your blog to its full business potential.

You will learn how to build a custom theme for your blog and incorporate multimedia content like images and video. Advanced promotion techniques like SEO and social media marketing are covered in detail before you learn how to monetize your blog and manage its growth.

WordPress 3 for Business Bloggers will help you to create a blog that brings real benefits to your business.

What you will learn from this book:

• Develop a ‘blogging business plan’ – clarify your blogging goals Download Now »