I decided to start learning a new language over my holiday after my first year at university, I’ve never coded in PHP before but have a student-level background of programming. After my initial project in which I worked on a way to check YouTube channels and grab the video information and output it to an email I decided that it would be worthwhile doing something bigger with PHP as I enjoyed working with the language. So I proceeded to do something which I was originally going to do in ASP.NET (the only other server-side language I knew) I thought it would be a useful idea to automate a process which scrapes a Twitter feed and looks for a key phrase. Then put it all in one manageable place. A friend of mine gave me some server access and a database to play around on, this allowed me the freedom of being able to create something without some of the limits some web-masters put on their servers, and also that I could turn to someone if I was really stuck and could use some help - or if I accidently ran in infinite loop and made the server hang.. I also love the retro/vintage design of some websites and products, unfortunately my design skills only stretched so far so I had to keep it reasonably basic whilst keeping functionality in mind. It was also a good opportunity to work with an API, I had heard that OAuth was a good place to start and I knew Twitter used it so I thought it would be a nice place to start, I have never worked with any API before and although I had some initial teething problems I now understand how it works quite well.  This app does everything I wanted it to do originally, and then some. I have practiced and gained skills in RegEx, PHP and HTML. Things I never even thought where possible I managed to achieve in this project and am very happy with the way it has all turned out. I honestly could not have done it without the help of the PHP documentation, some of my programming friends, a library I used from GitHub and the friendly people over at Stack Overflow. I really look forward to working with PHP in the future and hope to make some things I will be proud of. Source available on request.

I decided to start learning a new language over my holiday after my first year at university, I’ve never coded in PHP before but have a student-level background of programming. After my initial project in which I worked on a way to check YouTube channels and grab the video information and output it to an email I decided that it would be worthwhile doing something bigger with PHP as I enjoyed working with the language.

So I proceeded to do something which I was originally going to do in ASP.NET (the only other server-side language I knew) I thought it would be a useful idea to automate a process which scrapes a Twitter feed and looks for a key phrase. Then put it all in one manageable place. A friend of mine gave me some server access and a database to play around on, this allowed me the freedom of being able to create something without some of the limits some web-masters put on their servers, and also that I could turn to someone if I was really stuck and could use some help - or if I accidently ran in infinite loop and made the server hang..

I also love the retro/vintage design of some websites and products, unfortunately my design skills only stretched so far so I had to keep it reasonably basic whilst keeping functionality in mind. It was also a good opportunity to work with an API, I had heard that OAuth was a good place to start and I knew Twitter used it so I thought it would be a nice place to start, I have never worked with any API before and although I had some initial teething problems I now understand how it works quite well. 

This app does everything I wanted it to do originally, and then some. I have practiced and gained skills in RegEx, PHP and HTML. Things I never even thought where possible I managed to achieve in this project and am very happy with the way it has all turned out.

I honestly could not have done it without the help of the PHP documentation, some of my programming friends, a library I used from GitHub and the friendly people over at Stack Overflow.

I really look forward to working with PHP in the future and hope to make some things I will be proud of.

Source available on request.

(Source: lewisjuggins.co.uk)