We have created a Joomla plugin that will help you easily link Google plus profile with Joomla Blogs or articles. All you have to do is install the plugin from Joomla plugin page and follow the basic steps as mentioned on the page. Some of the important steps are:

1. First of all you will need a Google+ profile. If you don’t have one this is a good time to create one!

2. Then while you are setting up Contact profile in Joomla, ensure that you enter correct Google+ profile url in Web URL field as displayed in below image

3. Do add link of your site under “Contributor to” section of Google+ profile (under edit profile) as displayed in below image

4. After you have done all this, and enabled the plugin. You can immediately test whether integration with Google+ and Google Search is working or not by going to  http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets Enter the url of your page and if the result shows image of the author as displayed below, then the integration is working just fine. 

Now it is just a matter of time before your image starts appearing on Google search. Some times you may need to add a new Article / blog to your site so that google can crawl the site for the search index to get updated and new results to start showing up.

I am using unbuntu based EC2 instance so commands are specific to that but the steps are mostly generic and will apply to most linux distributions.

There are basically 4 steps for this:

1.  Create CSR 

I basically used OpenSSL to generate CSR as it is installed by default in ubuntu. You can go to https://www.digicert.com/easy-csr/openssl.htm to get the command to generate CSR. Once you have the command login to your EC2 instance via ssh. And run the command. It will create 2 files, namely www_domain_com.csr and  www_domain_com.key  [in this case I am generating certificate for www]

2.  Buy SSL certificate

Once you have the CRS ready you need to buy the certificate. This should generally be quick. I generally use godaddy as they offer huge discounts ;). Once you have bought the certificates you will get domain.com.crt file. Please retain the key file that you generated inthe CSR process (step 1).

3.  Enable HTTPS support on Apache

a. Run the command “sudo a2enmod ssl” to enable mod_ssl. 

b. Then run the “sudo a2ensite default-ssl” to configure Apache2 for HTTPS. 

c. After you have done this restart Apache “sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart”. 

The HTTPS support on apache should work now. One important point to note here (this wasted a lot of my time , you need to open port 443 on AWS console from the Security group for this server. Though we have not installed the certificate yet, but just test the site with HTTPS to ensure that you are able to access the server. Now you should be able to access the site on HTTPS. 

4. Install the certificate 

Now you have both key and certificate files ready and Apache already is enabled to support HTTPS. So let’s go ahead and install the newly got certificate files. For this you need to copy the .key file (that got generated while creating CSR) to /etc/ssl/private/ and certificate file to /etc/ssl/certs/. Then open the file /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl and search SSLCertificateFile and SSLCertificateKeyFile. Change these paths to the actual certificate and key paths and restart the Apache server.

Now you are all set!

If you are using the URLs such as http://domainname/index.php?pid=12&uid=821 they do serve the purpose of opening the correct page however they do not provide any information to the user as to what page they are going to see and what they should expect on this page. Also, as we all know the URLs are also very useful for search engine optimizations, so unless the URL conveys complete information it is not of much use.

So in the above case let’s assume that pid represents the page (for example user’s profile page) that needs to be opened and uid represents the user’s id whose information will be displayed on this page, if we change the URL to something like http://domainname/userprofile/firstname-lastname

(Be aware google treats dash and underscore differently in the URL and dashes are better) then it conveys a lot of meaning to the end user and also is meaningful for search engines. However one point to note above is that a URL needs to be unique and in the above URL there is no element that makes it unique. So we need to insert another element that is unique in the above url. Generally each of the resource has an id associated with it, so that can be used to make a unique url something like http://domainname/userprofile/821/firstname-lastname

Now to achieve this change in URL all you have to do is map pid=12 with userprofile using htaccess rules and use the unique id to render the page. Also, you would want to create a utility function that will generate the user profile URLs. Within this function you can encapsulate the logic of URL creation, whether it is as simple as concatenating two fields or using a new table column as slug.

If you have a URL such as http://domainname/page/info1-info2 dashes (-) are then translated by google as spaces so the above “info1-info2” becomes “info1  info2” however if you are using “info1_info2” it translates to “info1info2”.

So if you are deciding on the URL scheme it is better to use dash rather than underscores however as per Matt in this video it is not worth the effort to change the existing urls which have underscores to dashes.

(Please ensure that you are a genuine user of the site, and site allows you to do some automation and does not consider it as hacking attempt)

Let’s assume that the task for the day is to pull some data out of a site (eg. download a csv file) programmatically where data is behind a login. We shall use PHP/cURL for this automation. I am not going to be talking about cURL or any basic technical details associated with it. So please do not treat this as tutorial for learning cURL J. I am only going to talk about high level process to be followed and some gotchas that could make your life difficult in this process.

First step: You will need to login to the site using cURL. Inspect the login form using a tool such as Firebug or view source to see what all fields are being sent and what is the endpoint of the request. You will need all this information to send login request to the site using cURL. In fact, make a small HTML version of form (using code from the site) on local machine and try and login with that. If it works part of the job is done.

Another point that could be very helpful here is, if the form uses POST request convert that to GET and send the request to a local url to see what all parameters are passed. Sometimes there could be some hidden variables which are not very easy to track. Now inspect the query string from the GET request and create a url for cURL POST based on this string. One important point while writing login request is not to forget saving the cookie. So set the option CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE with filename. Also, you could get the filename using $tmp_fname = tempnam("/tmp", "COOKIE"); to make it platform independent (windows, Linux, Mac)

Every site comes with its own site of rules for login but broadly keeping above points in mind you should be able to login to any site using cURL.

Second Step: After login the next step is to get the file and save it on disk. If the site URL is simple (non dynamic) then there is no problem just invoke a simple GET request for that URL with cURL and save it to disk. However if the URL for the file is dynamic then you need to fetch the page which has the link, search for the link in the page of that text (knowledge of REGEX would come handy here) and get the dynamic URL. And then invoke cURL again on the dynamic URL to get the data. One point to keep in mind in case you are dealing with dynamic URL is that when you get the string for URL in php variables if there is any & it gets converted to & so if you directly invoke the url to get the data it will not work. Use htmlspecialchars_decode to get actual URL and you should be able to save the data.

Facebook gives you a functionality to add facebook applications as tabs on your existing pages. Also there are (programmatic) ways to be able to find out if users have liked your page or not. This functionality can very well be used to 'entice' users to like your pages. We have added a "Welcome" tab to our Facebook page. Do take a look at the same and let us know what you think about it. This application is completely CMS driven, so you can change what displays on the pages without knowing any HTML. If you like the application and want to know more about it mail us at fbapp (at) codefire.in