So, let’s continue to develop Mass PageRank Checker tool. I will use CodeIgniter (CI) PHP framework for it. It’s really simple and very powerful thing. But first I need Curl library for CI to make easier working with HTTP queries.

In brief, the library must do the following things:

1. Send HTTP GET/POST requests and receive HTTP responses.
2. Get information about queries like HTTP error code, total time for operation, number of sent/received bytes for operation, etc.
3. Handle the errors.

I just wrote this library, you can download it here.

To use it just copy Curl.php to CI’s system/application/libraries folder, curl_lang.php to CI’s system/application/language/english folder and load it from your controllers:

$this->load->library('curl');

For example let’s simulate the search in Google:

$keyword = 'travel';
$this->load->library('curl');
$this->curl->open();
$content = $this->curl->http_get("http://www.google.com/search?q=$keyword");
$this->curl->close();
echo $content;

This is very simple example. At this moment the library has not powerful features. Here the list of what you can do and how you can do using Curl library:

• Set additional options like User-Agent (MSIE 7.0 by default), timeout for operations in seconds (30 by default).

$this->curl->open(array('user_agent' => 'CURL library', 'timeout' => 60));

• Send HTTP GET query and get the content. Setting $headers_only = TRUE will cause you receive HTTP headers only. You can specify additional HTTP headers in $headers variable.

function http_get($url, $headers = array(), $headers_only = FALSE)

• Send HTTP POST query and get the content. POST parameters must be specified in $fields variable like ‘a=1&b=2&str=test%20example’

function http_post($url, $fields, $headers = array(), $headers_only = FALSE)

• There are a few functions for getting different information about query

function get_http_code()
function get_total_time()
function get_bytes_uploaded()
function get_bytes_downloaded()
function get_speed_upload()
function get_speed_download()

In the future I’m planning to add the following features to library: referer and autoreferer support, cookies, proxies, authorization, follow location feature, caching, file uploading, additional headers and may be some more.

Just finished new design for my blog. It’s fully based on Blueprint CSS framework. After I used it for Mass PageRank Checker tool’s design layout, I decided to use it for the blog’s design too and may be for all my tools and sites. It’s really cool thing.

I will not write a new tutorial about Blueprint in this post but I will give you some useful links which will help you to learn it.

• Official Blueprint tutorial
• Blueprint Google Group
• BlueprintCSS 101 - Nice article about Blueprint features
• Hands on with Blueprint, a CSS Framework - Great blueprint tutorial with code examples
• First Impressions of the Blueprint CSS Framework
• Blueprint Cheat Sheet (PDF)

These are enough to learn how to create really nice web-pages using Blueprint.