The Fliquid Studios site has posted their introduction to using the Google Search API via a cURL interface in PHP.

A lot of people these days use 3rd party sites or services to gain SEO data about their site or service. A lot of these people simply do not realize just how simple it is to build some tools to gain statistics from the big search engines. In this post I plan to give you a very basic introduction on how to go about getting some search engine statistics from Google using their API.

They show how to create the connection (including the URL to search on) and a form that can be used to submit the terms back to the script. A demo and downloadable code are included.

On the AskAboutPHP.com blog eldee takes a look at helpers, plugins and libraries in the CodeIgniter PHP framework including some examples.

With so many published PHP classes and functions, it would be a shame if we couldn't use them in CI. Fortunately CI (like all good frameworks) provides not one but three ways to integrate 3rd code, by using Helpers, Plugins and Libraries. [...] As I found out during the course of my CI project, Helpers, Plugins and Libraries are nothing more than glorified includes. I can pretty much take any 3rd party code and integrate into my application using any of the 3 methods.

His example uses the Google Graph class as each type (helper, library and plugin) with some example code.

The NETTUTS.com site has a new tutorial posted today showing how to combine jQuery and PHP to add auto complete functionality to a simple search engine.

This tutorial will show you how to use the "Popular Queries" feed from your Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) as a data source for a jQuery autocomplete.

They walk through the creation of the search page and provide the code for the jQuery half that calls the autocomplete() method on the search field. The PHP script that's called loads the XML file from Google's server with the latest from the "Popular Queries" page. This is then parsed and sent back out as Javascript back to the waiting jQuery. They also include a brief look at caching the results by writing them out to a file that's checked and updated based on the results of a filectime() call.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new post with links to two interesting Zend Framework related articles:

Ok, ZendCon is over and I'm back to surfing for things you will find interesting. Two articles posted that I didn't cover but feel they are content rich enough to mention are "Create a productivity package with the Zend Framework V1.5 and Google Apps" and "How We Built a Web Hosting Infrastructure on EC2". Click on in and I'll give you details and links.

The productivity package is a series of articles (three) where John Mertic shows how to integrate your ZF application with the many tools Google offers.

In the infrastructure and EC2 articles Mike Brittain talks about an EC2-driven Zend Framework application (the "why" not really the "how").

Wanting to automate the trackbacking process for articles linked to on the site, the ProDevTips blog went with a simple method using the Google Blog Search and Zend_Feed to parse the resulting feed from the search.

So Google Blog Search it is then. When you use the search you have the option of subscribing to it through an RSS feed. I did a link:url search and just copied the resultant feed URL. Using this URL it is possible to fetch for instance 10 results and display them through parsing the atom feed.

The example script queries the Google search, requests an output format of atom and spits back out a listing of the other sites/blog posts that link to any given article.

Asvin Balloo has posted the second part of his geolocate with PHP tutorial series - using the mapping information gathered from the previous article to plot them on a map.

In the first part of this series I showed how you could get the country of a visitor via his IP address. Now with this precious information, I'll show you how to map the visitor visually on the world map using Google Maps.

The full code is provided - the PHP to pull the latitude/longitude information from the GeoIP library and the Javascript to get the Google Map to plot the point. You can check out the live demo for an example or just grab the source and try it out for yourself.

Rudy Nappee has just finished what he calls the hardest week in his Google Summer of Code project - work on the PDF output methods:

Here was the hardest GSoC week ! I wrote a big part of the PDF output and both the themes "phppdf" (each PHP manual part in a file) and "phpbigpdf" (a big PDF file with all the sections).

Rudy's project for the GSoC is to create a Docbook renderer that can take in a standard Docbook file and output it into multiple formats. This past week saw the development of the PDF output method but he's also created methods for making a CHM (Windows help file) and a manpage output format. You can keep up with his latest progress on his blog.

Just for you Lively early adopters out there, there's a script that's been posted to the International Stock Exchange forum showing how to get a feed into the virtual world.

Here is a free PHP script to convert the titles of a news feed to a PNG graphic for display in Google Lively. To display a news feed in Google Lively, go to the "Add object" button, search for "Picture Frame". Click on add to room and then edit properties. In Gadget Options place the url of the PHP script in the option box.

The script can then be hosted on a web server where it can pull down the latest stories and update the PNG image accordingly.

The IBM developerWorks site has posted a new tutorial (written up by Vikram Vaswani) about integrating your application with the Google Calendar web service.

Google Calendar allows Web application developers to access user-generated content and event information through its REST-based Developer API. PHP's SimpleXML extension and Zend's GData Library are ideal for processing the XML feeds generated by this API and using them to build customized PHP applications. This article introduces the Google Calendar Data API, demonstrates how you can use it to browse user-generated calendars; add and update calendar events; and perform keyword searches.

As mentioned, the tutorial steps you through a pretty complete interface with the Google Calendar API - everything from fetching events, adding new ones and searching your current events. He uses the GCal library to interface with the API.

Padraic Brady has posted about a new inclusion that Google has announced will be included in the authentication methods for their APIs - OAuth.

The Google Data API support comes with a few gotchas. Its documentation show a clear preference for using GET instead of POST, though the Google OAuth server does appear to natively support POST requests for everything with the exception that it has a small bug which interprets an empty POST request body as a sort of phantom empty parameter.

He notes that the library he's been working on (and submitted to both the Zend Framework and PEAR) it up to the 0.0.3 release including functionality marked as beta for the Consumer portion.