Lucky Murari's Blog

I got attracted by Katie's Project which she aptly named 1x52. Basically, 1x52 is a challenge where the pursuers aim at creating a project per week round the year. At first look, I thought that it is a humongous task and will be very difficult to continue. But, I also understood that it will be very helpful in improving my Skills. Also, from my experience I realized that I work better with deadlines. By having just one week for every project, my effectiveness ( mind you, not efficiency ) should improve a lot. If I am successful in this, I may also improve my perseverance, which I think is a bit not upto the level of other qualities of mine. And as always, if successful , it brings me some fame too :P

Though, I am going to play by the ground rules laid down by Katie, I will be taking freedom to mend the rules or introduce my own. For now, the rules I am going to play with are these:

1) Every week, there will be a project without any lapse. ( IMO, This is the most difficult rule )

2) Every project will be followed by a blog post {I will mend this rule -> I can write the post any time (no deadline), but they should be sequential :) }.

3) Project may not always be related to programming/tech ( This is the big deviation I will be taking from Katie's idea ).

4) Project's size doesn't matter -> but it should be finished in a week!!

5) Project should be useful to someone (me, or my audience or some unknown).

6) Every project should be aimed towards benefiting me ( through learnings, Moooney or recognition )

7) Don't aim to conquer the world using these projects.

8) Do not break any of the above rules.

My first Project - StartupQuote Images Grabber

For the first 1x52 project, I had many ideas. I shortlisted one of those ideas and thought of working on it. But my work life took over me and I realized that I cannot finish that project for this week. So, as a starting project, I wanted to do something small but useful to me. Startup Quote is a website that collects Quotes by various people (real and fictional!!) involved with Startups and display them in nice images. The site is hosted on Tumblr. I wanted to aggregate all those images at one place, so that I can refer to them easily. I also wanted to upload them all into my Facebook albums. I will be adding my own commentary on those quotes, as and when I get time. Midway through the project, I realized that I need to host it online. I previously worked with SVN but never with Git. So, I decided to host it on Github.

Problem Statement : 

Create a script to mine all the Startup Quote images from StartupQuote website and share them on Facebook. Also, learn how to host projects on Github.

Solution :

I initially thought of doing it in Python because I don't know Python. But due to lack of time, I decided against it. Then, I thought to use Wget+SED but I decided not to as I have worked on projects using them previously and it is just too easy. So, I decided on doing it using PHP. I was good at PHP, but I kind of forgot it as stopped coding in it. After an hour of setting up XAMPP and Curl, I wrote the code that grabs all images from StartupQuote. After uploading those images on Facebook, I used the documentation from Github to set up a project - Startup Quote Images Grabber.

Learnings:

1) How to use CURL to download and save images. ( Re-learned )

2) You can upload only 200 photos per Facebook album.

3) How to setup projects on Github.