I was testing some plugins for allowing my visitor to share my posts in social networks like Twitter ot Facebook and the one I liked it the most was Sociable. ButI realized it used awe.sw for shorten URLs with Twitter and Identi.ca, but awe.sw service is colapsed and they’re not longer inviting new people. Thus, I started to research some ways to make it work with Bit.ly and I found this post that explains exactly what I wanted to, however they use the file_get_contents function, which throws this error in my server:

Warning: file_get_contents() [function.file-get-contents]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /home/g/gallardo/web/wp-content/plugins/sociable/sociable.php on line 813

This is because the allow_url_fopen variable is not enabled in PHP. After asking my hosting provider, they recommended me to use cURL instead of file_get_contents,so I had to make some modifications to the sociable.php file, and I had to add a new one called sociable-bitly.php where all URLs are shorten with cURL.

I put both files into the sociable.3.5.2-hacked.zip zip, just in case somebody needs it. But be aware, it’s not the whole plugin, I just put these file to be copied into the /sociable folder in the official plugin.  Another thing to keep in mind is that you have to edit the sociable-bitly.php with your Bit.ly login and API Key information in the following lines:

$bitlylogin = 'yourbitlylogin';
$bitlyapikey= 'yourbitlyapikey';

Other things can be done with this plugin, for instance all awe.se code can be removed, the Bit.ly input files can be added to the setting panel, or it can be integrated with tinyurl. I hope next official version comes with some of these features.

References:

• How To: Sociable WP Plugin With Auto TinyURL Or Bit.ly Shortening
• Client URL Library

Yesterday I had some issues with the WordPress 2.8 update and, supposedly,  qtranslate (a plugin to support several languages). The thing is I could restore WordPress 2.7.1 from an old backup, but I realized it dated from a month ago…bad, bad. I decided to do a research on automatic full-backup with cpanel and I came across the Automatic cPanel backup (domain & MySQL) with cron & PHP post by Justin Cook .There’s a php script to perform the cPanel‘s full backup request with ftp redirection to a remote host. Due to I don’t have a ftp server, I changed some lines to make backup locally, so I could get those backups from cPanel full-backup tool. Here’s what I got:

PHP Script

<?php
// Info required for cPanel access
$cpuser = "username";
$cppass = "password";
$domain = "example.com";
$skin = "x3";

// Notification information
$notifyemail = "[email protected]";

// Secure or non-secure mode
$secure = 1;

// Set to 1 to have web page result appear in your cron log
$debug = 0;

// ** NO EDIT BELOW THIS LINE ***

if ($secure) {
   $url = "ssl://".$domain;
   $port = 2083;
} else {
   $url = $domain;
   $port = 2082;
}

$socket = fsockopen($url,$port);

if (!$socket) {
   echo "Failed to open socket connection… Bailing out!\n"; exit;
}

// Encode authentication string
$authstr = $cpuser.":".$cppass;
$pass = base64_encode($authstr);

$params = \
"dest=homedir&email=$notifyemail&server=&user=&pass=&port=&rdir=";

// Make POST to cPanel
fputs($socket,\
"POST /frontend/".$skin."/backup/dofullbackup.html?".$params." HTTP/1.0\r\n");
fputs($socket,"Host: $domain\r\n");
fputs($socket,"Authorization: Basic $pass\r\n");
fputs($socket,"Connection: Close\r\n");
fputs($socket,"\r\n");

// Grab response even if we don't do anything with it.
while (!feof($socket)) {

$response = fgets($socket,4096);

if ($debug) echo $response;
}
fclose($socket);
?>

You can download the example here…

Cron jobs

In order to have the backup made every 15 days just save the above script as fullbackup.php and set cron in cPanel‘s tool as shown next:

References

• Automatic cPanel backup (domain & MySQL) with cron & PHP