Some web sites (like IMDb) prevent external scripts from parsing their contents by denying request without a user-agent string. Though this can be circumvented by manually sending the necessary headers, this is usually too complicated. These functions (be_fopen and be_file) wrap the fsockopen calls and send all the necessary headers before returning a file handle usable with any PHP function. As a side-effect, you may be able to break the restrictions of allow_url_fopen with these functions!
This tutorial will demonstrate how it is possible to easily grab the contact list from Gmail or MSN messenger and then contact all the email addresses returned. This is quite a nice method to 'turbocharge' the basic 'tell-a-friend' style script. Rather than contacting one friend it is quick and simple to contact fifty or a hundred contacts which means more likely visitors to your site.
Most scripts written for getting a Google PageRank connect to the Google servers everytime someone views a page where the script is called. Depending on how busy your site is this can mean that you connect to Google thousands of times each day to get exactly the same information. This script uses a cache to prevent this from happening. This is far faster (my tests suggested about 30 times faster) and requires less bandwidth.
This class allows you to grab financial stock market quotes from Yahoo finance's CSV file. This class doesn't provide a graphical interface to display the values, but returns them as an array. The big advantage is that you may include stock quotes nicely in your website (a.e in tickers), without having to use remote hosted JavaScript tickers. For high frequented sites, a cache functionality is included to prevent this script from transfering the quotes every time you access a page.
This class is capable of connecting to the MSN messenger network and downloading a users contacts. The e-mail addresses and screen names are returned as an array.
This script is designed to collect and show series of images with similair names like image001.jpg image002.jpg, etc. The pro version offers all kinds of statistics like Top 10 sites, Last 10 visitors queries etc.
This compact script utilizes the MSN weather codes to display the current temperature in fahrenheit and its respective icon. Just cut and paste the code to a PHP page and edit the city weather code.
