How to create a stock portfolio website? - portfolio

in short, I've a task of creating a stock portfolio website, something similar to Google Finance's portfolio, or Seeking Alpha's portfolio feature but before I start to attempt it, I thought I'd ask to see what would be the best way to go about doing it? For now, I was just thinking about using PHP and just connecting to Google or Yahoo Finance to get the data from them but surely, there is probably some better way to go about it?
Thanks.

I've built many different stock applications and here's what i've found.
Yahoo and Google have fickle APIs, some of them work sometimes and then break because they are poorly maintained or not official. I have scrapped yahoo's financial data before for specific information using PHP DOM.
If you want realtime ticker data like price, volume ect. consider etrades free API: https://developer.etrade.com/ctnt/dev-portal/getArticleByCategory?category=Documentation It is pretty reliable, I query their data every 4 seconds with no issues in PHP.
Also another good resource is https://www.quandl.com/search?query= some of it is free and some if it is premium paid content.

Related

CS-Cart: integrating Fishbowl

I am developing a cs-cart based website and my client wants to integrate Fishbowl into his website.
I have searched an add-on for it, but there is no one for me.
I have experience developed a simple add-on and, now I am going to build one add-on to integrate fishbowl.
Please guide me if you have solid experience on integrating fishbowl and cs-cart or another warehouse solution for cs-cart.
I don't understand why the fishbowl doesn't provide or developed the add-on for it.
Please help!
Thanks for reading!
Well, there are a few things to watch out for, and therefore a number of options.
Firstly, what does your client really want. Does he want the stock to be updated on the fly, or once a night? If the client wants to stock to be updated on the fly you will need to add some sort of post function for updating products to also execute your code. If your client wants it only once a night you could just get away by sending every product in the database (with your selected columns).
Secondly, try using object oriented code. If you are really into PHP you will know what I mean by this. Otherwise dont bother (or try learing PHP Object Oriented), though I must note that this can make your addon significantly faster.
Thirdly, use the provided dbquery function
If you have any more questions regarding this, feel free to ask.

downloadable item product selling cart with filter

I want to sell downloadable product like: video files, pdf files, word documents, text documents etc.
And also my storefront should have filtering feature.
I have option for following cart in my hosting control panel:
Abantecart, Opencart 1.5, PrestaShop etc. Actually I am accessing mochahost cPanel.
To make a storefront of downloadable products with filtering feature, Which free cart product should I choose?
Big, proven, free, plus easy customization: WooCommerce. It's a classic for a reason.
The real issue is: how is the rest of your website managed? What software languages are you intending? Server? # of hits projected / day? You definitely want tools that easily integrate, and have an active feedback and improvement system. (Open source on Github?)
PHP or Java Content Management system? (Symphony, Laravel, Wordpress? dotCMS, Magnolia, Hippo, Jahia, OpenCMS?) I'd pick one of those first, then choose a storefront that integrates nicely. If you are just starting out, and don't expect more than 5K to 10K hits a day, Wordpress / WooCommerce is way easy. If bigger growth than that, I'd think I'd be looking at Java implementation.
Reference your comment on Uploading API costing money.
So download a free version, and write an upload tool yourself. Shouldn't be a big deal.
And hey, how much are these guys charging, anyway? What is your time worth?
I thought you were selling downloaded items.. why would your customers be uploading anything anyway? In fact, why is an upload tied to the shopping cart in the first place? (I can see letting folks upload quality content, then earning credit, but that doesn't have to be directly tied to the shopping cart...)
You will certainly be able to find sample code to safely allow users to upload content.

Website creation query

I need to create a website which stores the list of all games the player has played and it shows right on your profile. As the player goes on completing a game, he adds the game into his list.
So i would need a basic lo-gin configuration and then by using AJAX, I will populate the list of games which he wants to add to his list. So that he can track the list with games that he has played.
So now I need suggestion on how to go on with it?
How to start building?
Which language do I need to pickup?
I am well versed with Java and j2ee.
Is this enough?
Also I am a freelancer so I can't afford to pay for a website. So any free website hosting service which will help me to build the website which I have in mind??
Also if I use any free website hosting service, will they provide me with a database and AJAX capabilities?
Here's the basic setup:
You need a domain first. Try to pick something unique, as it will be cheaper. You can find one on namecheap: https://www.namecheap.com
You need hosting. Again, go with namecheap.
To start building, you need to learn some HTML and CSS. HTML is markup of the web, and CSS is the stylesheet of the web. They aren't hard languages to start off in. You can start for free at Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming/html-css
I believe namecheap offers database support as well. Ajax isn't provided by a hosting service. It's more of a group of languages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript).
This should get you going. I can't really give you more detailed information than this because your question is really broad. If you Google your questions, you'll get good answers and guides.
Best of luck.

Ideas to extend this little project? - A pidgin web ui

I have built a little Web UI for Pidgin(respectively all libpurple based messengers) together with DBus and Sinatra.
It was for fun and learning purposes and now I'm looking for ideas to extend it.
Can you think of any useful applications or extensions for it?
Since I work on this project to learn something new, ideas for other technologies to be used/combined are welcome.
Finally here is the link: pidgin-web-ui
I few things that that might use to many many people would be:
good and simple to configure https support, so that users in "monitored" countries to be able to still chat freely (if the server is somewhere else).
Unified Message Archive . Many IM clients have various archive functions, but are different, limited, hard to search, and many are "client only", so not accessible when one needs them the most. Since Pidgin can connect to so many IM networks, it would be cool to have such a "global message hub archive". This would ensure that everything the user is talking is archived (very useful for businesses too), easy to search, available on a server (so always at hand).
File Archive on the server. The same as the Unified Message Archive, but for the files/images users exchange. Having them on the server (with a hash for easy sync) as a backup and archive would greatly reduce the traffic if they need to be shared more than once.
The would be many more nice features, that would help many users, but the above 3 seem to miss from usual IM software.
My idea after a brainstorming minute:
Dropbot
Create a messaging account anywhere and add this account as a contact to your messenger. This contact is your Dropbot.
Change your interpreter UI so it does not display a conversation but a log. In this way you can just drop things to the contact like interesting links. There could be a Dropbot for a read later queue, your favorite citations or for a list of funny findings.
You could then extend your UI to a little mashup. It could follow the links and grap the title of the page and a content preview just as Facebook does it when posting a link to your wall.
You could further extend your app by adding post-drop behavior to the Dropbot.
Dropbot could post your link (probably with a message) on Twitter or Facebook.
Dropbot could automatically distribute the link to the other contacts of it (like your friends)
Ok, that sounds fine... but you could do that without a message bot inbetween. What's the deal?
For me the advantage would be that my IM is always open and it would be fairly easy to drop a link. You could do the link dropping with Delicious or post stuff to a Google Wave, yeah. But I don't like to go to a web page, log in and organize stuff in the UI. Actually I stumble upon those links when I should do more important stuff instead. So just dropping it to my IM Dropbot contact would be cool.
Why not extend it to cover all the basic features of instant messaging (sending/receiving messages, adding contacts, etc...)? Seeing how many features you can reproduce may be a fun exercise. Create your own little Meebo...
Want to have fun?
Make a Markov-chained-based chatbot integrated into the web app. Make it use scraped web search results for the content, after searching for terms parsed out of the human's responses. That should be fun, and will give you funny, and sometimes eerily smart-looking results. Have fun!
I have seen your code. Why not split dbus_thread into a event_machine daemon for further scalability?
Integrate it with Twitter. Trace conversations (#Replies), including multi-party involvement. Log them. And so on.
Many interesting features and a popular, original API to learn.

How do I Extend Blogengine.Net to collect statistics of visitors?

I love BlogEngine. But from what I can se it does not collect the standard information about the visitors I would like to see (referrer, browser-type and so on).
When I log in as Admin I have a menu item named "Referrer". I can choose a weekday and then I'll be presented with 1 or 2 rows with
"google.com 4 hits, "itmaskinen.se 6 hits" and so on, But that's not what I want to se, I want to se where my visitors come from, country, IP if possible, how many visitors and so on.
If someone of you are familiar with Blogengine.Net and can point me in the right direction to where I would put my own log-code or if you know any visitor-statistic-extension that can do it for me, I would be really happy to know. I prefer an extension, because if I make changes myself to BlogEngine it may break later updates I install.
Blogengine.Net is a blog software made in .Net found here: http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/
And yes, I prefer to take this question here rather then in the Blogengine.Net forum, you know why. ;)
(Anyone, feel free to edit my (bad) english in this post and after that delete this sentence)
This isn't an extension, but it's what I use to collect all my blogengine.net data and it should be upgrade safe.
When you log into the Blogengine.NET admin screens you can go to "Settings> Custome Code > Tracking Script", here you can put your http://www.google.com/analytics/ logging script. Google Analytics provides all the referrer, browser type, etc stuff you were wanting. And what's nice is you can then create additional accounts for other sites if you choose.
I use both Google Analytics and StatCounter to track visitor stats. I find that each one provides useful information that the other doesn't. And they're both free to a certain extent.
I place their javascript code int the site.master file of my custom BE.Net skin.
For Google Analytics I go a step further and pass the username of authenticated users as a custom variable. That way I can match users names up with the stats. To do this you can use the _setVar javascript method on the GA pageTracker like so:
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-129049-25");
var userDefinedValue = '<%= System.Web.Security.Membership.GetUser() != null ? System.Web.Security.Membership.GetUser().UserName : "" %>';
pageTracker._setVar(userDefinedValue);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>
Anyone noticed that we miss all the hits coming from RSS readers? Syndication.axd does not run the analytics javascripts. So we miss the vast majority of viewers from the statistics. And we happily analyze that is just not impotant - ad-hoc visitors.
For the vast majority of cases, Google Analytics does just fine. It all depends on how much data you want. For example, if you want to keep note of IP addresses and resolve them to get domain names, and also highlight all visits to your blog from, say, your coworkers at the company where you work, you'd have to write some custom code yourself. However, it's all fairly primitive - these sorts of things are easily achievable using ASP.NET.
I set up gathering statistics on IIS web site of my BlogEngine instance and then analyze the logs using WebLog Expert - http://www.weblogexpert.com.
It is more reliable than google analytics, since I see really ALL requests that are coming to my IIS, no matter if this is a request to axd or to some static content. And, once I've found out that google was fooling me in the number of visits. After that I trust my IIS statistics much more than google.
There is a Widget which can be use to display Visits and Online Users Statistics.
You can find it from following links:
http://www.nuget.org/packages/Statistics/
http://www.itnerd.ir/post/2013/07/25/Visits-and-Online-Users-Statistics-widget-for-BlogEngine-2
but to see the instructions go to the second link.

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