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I’ve spoken previously about Windows Live Contacts but never really did much with it. I didn’t have an immediate use for it and I was growing increasingly apathetic about the entire area of contact grabbers / importers. It was a shame really as it was a really exciting project with Microsoft leading the way in the area. It’s been only recently that Google and Yahoo have caught up and released their own APIs for accessing their users data.

I’ve moaned about how great it would be if we could get a users contacts without having to ask for their password. With services like Windows Live Contacts this is finally possible

With the possibility of actually using the code myself creeping up on the horizon I decided to put the time in to write wrappers for PHP. It can be broken down into two components.

Windows Live Delegated Authentication The first thing we need to do is get permission from the user to access their data. There was already a PHP wrapper for this but it did far more than I needed so I’ve rewritten it and ignored the parts I don’t expect to need. This evening I submitted it to the PEAR proposal process.

Windows Live Contacts The second step is fetching the contacts for the user after you have their permission. I could only find a small test script for this so a more complete implementation was definitely needed. Again, I’ve just submitted the code for this to the PEAR proposal process.

Both of these packages will likely undergo changes as they go through the proposal process but if you can’t wait to get started the files are available to be installed now on the proposal pages. The easiest way is using the PEAR installer. If you haven’t used PEAR before please take a look at the manual. If you’re still unsure of anything post a comment below.

Both these functions allow you to quickly pick a float, or double, out of a string.

doubleval vs floatval
doubleval: 4.56571412086 seconds
floatval: 4.35375285149 seconds
Time saved: 0.211961269379 seconds; 4.8684727087%

4% or 211 nanoseconds is next to nothing. I would want to use floatval but I wouldn’t exactly be kicking myself if I slipped a doubleval into my code instead.

It is not often that I link to other posts, but today I cannot seem to help myself.

Rand has written “An Exhaustive List of Search Engine Based Keyword Research Data“, and fairly exhaustive it is. I read quite a few blogs on a daily basis and there very few post that have me searching for the print icon, this is one of them.

Keyword research is a subject close to my heart at the moment. Yesterday, along with two colleagues, I gave a presentation called “How to make search engines love your site” to an audience of Chartered Institute of Marketing members. I believe just over 60 people attended, each having paid a reasonable, fee the pressure was on. No guessing what my main subject was… yep, keyword research. If only I had read Rand’s post first.

I have been toying with signing up for the SEOmoz premium content, this finally convinced me that I should and I am now approx $400 lighter, but the content and tools are more than worth it.