I looked around for some export functionality for github but I got a lot of posts complaining it wasn’t there. Since I hate applications that take your data and refuse to let you remove it, I was disappointed by this news but further inspection showed that although there might be no “export from github” button, there’s an API that more than has it covered. The API returns JSON which is easy to work with from many programming languages, and is perhaps even more powerful and flexible than the simple export I initially expected, so here are some examples.
Adding Multiple Axis Labels to a Google Chart
The axes in Google Charts are a bit interesting, because what they display bears absolutely no resemblance to what data is there – you label the axes separately, even if they are numbers. To label multiple things – in this example a scale and some units, you simply specify the axis more than once. To specify which axes should be shown, use chxt (CHart aXis Title) and set something like this:
&chxt=x,y,y
Then add the labels as required, for example:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chxl=1:|Sun|Mon|Tue|Wed|Thu|Fri|Sat|2:||Week+37
&chxr=0,0,20&chxs=0,676767,11.5,0,lt,676767&chxt=y,x,x&chbh=a
&chs=360x240&cht=bvg&chco=CC0057CC,3D7930&chds=0,20
&chd=t1:10.059,12.578,13.6,11.135,11.018,7.104,6.92|50,60,100,40,20,40,30
This produces a graph like this:
You can then add labels (using chxl) and ranges (uses chxr) to your axes as you wish – and even add axis labels to the top and right hand graph edges, using the t and r axes, with as many of each as you’d like, and using their list position as a parameter to the range/label settings. I hope this is useful to someone, as it took me a little bit of research to figure it out.
Make Blogging Your New Years Resolution
I’m coming up to my 5th anniversary of blogging and looking at my stats, I’ve written around 150 posts per year for most of that time, although in 2010 I “only” wrote 102 posts, possibly because one or two other things happened in my life. So many people tell me they want to blog, or they have a blog but can’t find the time to write, that I thought I’d try to give some pointers for those resolving to blog this New Year.
Launching Links in Opera from Command Line
To launch a link into a new tab in an existing Opera window, I simply used this:
opera --remote 'openURL(<url>, new-page)'
Where the <url> is the address to access; the same trick works in other programs too. For example I use irssi for IRC, with the openURL plugin, and this can do the same trick. To launch the link I simply set the http handler like this:
/set openurl_app_http opera --remote 'openURL($1, new-page)'
Since I have to look these settings up every time I want them, I thought I’d blog them for next time – and of course for anyone else who finds this useful between now and then!
Speaking at DIBI
I love it when really fantastic events happen in the north, especially because I’m based in Leeds and have ties to the North East, so I’m very excited to be speaking. Tickets go on sale in the New Year and I hope I’ll see lots of you at the Sage on 8th June!
Preparing for ZCE 5.3

OAuth Google API for Unregistered Applications
To make this work, when you sign your OAuth request Google will accept some default values for consumer key and secret – see their documentation on signing oauth requests. To do this, set both consumer key and secret to the value “anonymous”, and proceed as you normally would. The only difference so far as I can see is that the user will be shown a more cautious message when they are prompted to grant access to your application. Personally I think this is a great approach, particularly when prototyping ideas. Registering the applications though is simple and quick so I’d recommend registering for most applications once they get beyond concept stage.
ZCE 5.3: Worth Doing?
Updated Syllabus
The main thing that annoyed me about teaching people for the 5.0 exam in the last couple of years is that it had a topic on the differences between PHP 4 and PHP 5. Personally, I have never worked commercially with PHP 4, and that’s true for lots of developers that I meet. So I ended up trying to teach PHP 4 which seemed silly! Happily that is gone now from the 5.3 Syllabus.
There are some new topics and I’m pleased to see the Web Features topic being added. This brings together some HTTP concepts and overall client/server architecture stuff that really helps round out the syllabus. I consider that studying for the exam is in the interests of all PHP developers, these topics are all useful and relevant.
Declaring Static Methods in PHP
- Static functions can be called dynamically
- Dynamic functions generate an E_STRICT error if called statically
This made a lot more sense when I thought about it a bit more and wrote some toy code: