Save Money with My Mashup/Coding Project (Featured on Programmable Web)

My Coding and Side Project, SaveOnAtoZ.com was recently featured on Programmable Web a few weeks back. It simply appeared on the front page. I did not have time to write a blurb on it then, but I wanted to write it down as one of my accomplishments. Programmable web features a list of API's and their corresponding web "Mashups". Mashups are defined as

a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source.

- Wikipedia

What is Save On A To Z? Well the goal is to save money on everything. Simply speaking, the site connects to various apis and helps you conduct product searches based on keywords. The different result sets are segmented and / or listed on the same page according to your preferences. You can bookmark and compare the items side to side. The result sets can be loaded in to the same page via ajax.

The results are drawn from Amazon, Ebay, Half, Shopzilla, Buy.com, Best Buy, Shop.com, Google Base (Formerly Froogle), Nextag, Sortprice, MSN just to name a few of the engines. You can seriously check across all these sites within a few seconds. In addition, I am always expanding the result sets.

My goal is to provide you one of the most comprehensive resources for comparing prices and saving you money. With today's economy in a downward spiral and gas prices rising, we need to be sure that we are saving as much money as possible.

I hope you find my project useful. You can visit it here. If you can bookmark it on a social site, share it with friends, or link it in your blog, i would be most grateful. Thanks for reading. Hope this saves you a lot of money!

Fedex Track Service v2 : Cannot Authenticate

I was trying to deploy the track service via api for one of my clients and I was using the fedex php examples they provided. Unfortunately, I kept on getting an authentication error. It seemed the credentials Fedex had provided me where invalid. I tested this across several servers and then moved on to other api calls... it seemed it was the track service that was causing the issue.

After much debugging, support tickets, and hair turned white - we were finally able to get to the bottom of it. If you look in the wsdl, the call to the gateway is being made to

https:///gateway.fedex.com:443/web.services

try changing this to

https://gatewaybeta.fedex.com:443/web.services

the simple difference is the beta in 'gatewaybeta'. This routes you to the testing servers vs the production servers.

Hope this helps you. I spent days going back and forth on this.

My New Photography Site

I decided last night to start creating a site for my photography. I have been taking photographs regularly for about 10 years now. I have took several courses while I was in High School at Ransom Everglades and again in College where I was at University of Pennsylvania.

Mauricio Zuniga's Photography Site is just a small spot where you can browse through the various photographs that I have taken. The site is built from scratch except I used the help of phpFlickr as the starting point. As I keep working on the site and I will update with how I accomplished my own Php Flickr Gallery.

Thank you for looking

Nusoap php class and Godaddy.com hosting - CURL Settings!

I spent way too many hours trying to figure out how to get nusoap class to work on one of my godaddy accounts. It is actualy fairly simple, but not all too clear at first. It ends up being that nusoap.php classes are dependent on curl. Although curl is in fact instated on Godaddy, it isn't clear at first that you will need a proxy in order to get curl to work for you. If you start searching deep in the godaddy help, you will find examples on how to use curl, but it wasn't obvious (to me at least) that

in most cases, all you need to do is add this bit of code.

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, CURLPROXY_HTTP);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY,"http://proxy.shr.secureserver.net:3128");


this is a full example using curl
$URL="https://www.paypal.com";
if (isset($_GET["site"])) { $URL = $_GET["site"]; }
$ch = curl_init();
echo "URL = $URL
\n";
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
//curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPPROXYTUNNEL, TRUE);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, CURLPROXY_HTTP);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY,"http://proxy.shr.secureserver.net:3128");
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 120);
$result = curl_exec ($ch);
echo "

---

\n";
echo 'Errors: ' . curl_errno($ch) . ' ' . curl_error($ch) . '

';
echo "

---

\n";
curl_close ($ch);
print "result - $result";
echo "

---

\n";


now to get nusoap working...
go into nusoap.php
search for curl in text

you will find where curl options are set in this document,
just add the two lines of code

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, CURLPROXY_HTTP);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY,"http://proxy.shr.secureserver.net:3128");

now nusoap class show work for you on godaddy.com. Hope it saves you a few hours. Now please be kind and visit http://www.ChaoSearch.com comparison engine or at least click a google ad :).

My Current Web Project : Mashup Galore on SAVEonAtoZ.com

Look through multiple search engines, price comparison Engines, and other resources we can find.
Save Money On Everything: SAVEOnAtoZ.com

I am always working on adding new resources to help you find a better price including multiple comparison sites, meta search engines... its like meta^2.

The mashup features results from Amazon, Ebay, Half, Google Base, MSN, Shopzilla, Nextag and a few more resources as well. You can compare side by side in your shopping list and bookmark them for later. I have spent a lot of time on this project just learning how to use APIs and pulling the results from different locations, so I hope my efforts are not in vain.

I hope it saves everyone an incredible amount of money!
thanks for looking and please take some time to visit SAVEonAtoZ
thanks!
Mz