Google have an interesting webmaster tool safe browsing you can use it to check from time to time if your website or server is victim of malicious software or exploits. Sometimes your server might be attacked and the owner is not aware about it, so if you want to check simply open :

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=phpmagazine.net

And put your website after site=, the diagnostic page will include the current status, previous status during the last 90 days. Exploits are mainly scripting exploits, and google record also the server IP which host the malicious software.

The diagnostic will tell you also if your website have acted as intermediary in the distribution of malware, probably not very useful information for you, but it is safe to know if something was going wrong.

I think it's an excellent diagnostic that you can get for FREE for your website to make sure that it is safe to browse on your website.

Posted by Hatem at 8:15 AM to General | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have previously talked about Google Analytics PHP API, in that time there was no official API available yet. Today Google Analytics API is officially available to developers, so you can get your code working with a real API instead of hacks that might broke anytime if Google update their service... etc.

Doug Tan, Ask about PHP, have written Google Analytics PHP Class using the new API and a good tutorial on how to use it. Pretty simple and very easy to use, you will get Analytics data right in your applications in minutes. Below a sample code :

// include the Google Analytics PHP class include "googleanalytics.class.php"; // create an instance of the GoogleAnalytics class using your own Google {email} and {password} $ga = new GoogleAnalytics('{email}','{password}'); // set the Google Analytics profile you want to access - format is 'ga:123456'; $ga->setProfile('{GA Profile ID}'); // set the date range we want for the report - format is YYYY-MM-DD $ga->setDateRange('2009-04-01','2009-04-07'); // get the report for date and country filtered by Australia, showing pageviews and visits $report = $ga->getReport( array('dimensions'=>urlencode('ga:date,ga:country'), 'metrics'=>urlencode('ga:pageviews,ga:visits'), 'filters'=>urlencode('ga:country=@Australia'), 'sort'=>'-ga:pageviews' ) ); //print out the $report array print_r($report);

Posted by Hatem at 9:12 AM to Google Analytics | PHP | Permalink | Comments (0)

Darren pointed to a new feature in Google images search letting you to filter results by color ! The results looks very accurate that you will be interested to know how google are indexing colors ? Are they using image recognition techniques to index every image in their database ? That will be crazy if you think about it, but the answer could be easily found in something launched about three years ago, an ajax game, letting everyone to tag images and get scored on that : The image labeler.

Because the results are very accurate and fast, it can only be something based on a real human indexing ! You can see below for example if you search for a car model, you can get the result you are looking for, but imagine you want to see only gray cars in results, the filter can really give you what you are looking for. While if you used "gray" as keyword in search you will get something else completely different.

I find the color filter implementation very successful. Image search is getting more and more powerful search features and I expect to see more amazing filtering options, who knows !

Posted by Hatem at 7:02 PM to Images Search | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just wanted to profit from Google new year Doodle to wish happy new year to all Googling Magazine readers and PHP Magazine readers ! During more than three years I - and many others contributors - really enjoyed sharing ideas and thoughts with all of you. Thanks for your support and hope you will enjoy even more reading us in 2009.

Posted by Hatem at 8:04 AM to Google Logos | Permalink | Comments (0)

Holidays already here, so are you ready to celebrate ? Like every year, google celebrate it with a serie of Doodles, numbered 15. As usual we will keep this post updated everyday with the new doodle as it will be available.

Continue reading "2008 Holiday Doodle - Updated" »

Posted by Hatem at 4:48 PM to Google Logos | Permalink | Comments (2)

Google have just announced their entrance to the browsers war to join Microsoft IE, Mozilla FF, Safari, Opera and others. Chrome the new google browser, is very simple and very fast ! Chrome uses components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others - and that's not everything because Google is willing to make it Open Source.

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there.

For more information and download : http://www.google.com/chrome

Posted by Hatem at 8:47 PM to Google Chrome | Permalink | Comments (0)