Runescape offers an interface for fansites to grab hiscores info without having to load the entire hiscores page and use complicated scripts to pull out each piece. You can get the info by visiting this page: http://hiscore.runescape.com/index_lite.ws?player=yourusername

The page fill feed back info in line break and comma separated form. Each skill is separated by a line break and rank/level/xp are seperated by commas. In it’s default form it not very usable, you’d need to write some sort of script to format it. I was bored and decided to make a PHP script that converts the page into JSON format, making it very easy to use with a Javascript front-end.

The Graph API give you access to public information. If you need more you have to have an access token. There are a couple of ways of gaining one, but first you need to create an application and get an App ID & App Secret.

This is the first post in a mini series about the Facebook Graph API.

About It
The Graph API offers information about users, groups, pages, applications, photos, videos, events and more. You submit a query to the API and it returns information in JSON format.

There are plenty of free services out there that will check if your websites are up (list) and these are great for someone for just wants occasional checks. Most of these services are quite limiting and require you to sign up and create an account when all you want is a simple test.

Recently my internet service has been down multiple times a week and I wanted to setup monitoring. I checked out Pingdom and Mon.itor.us, but there free services didn’t check frequently enough. I did some searching and came across a script I could run off my web server (with decent uptime).

There are so many sites that have no optimization at all. Images are huge and scaled, scripts are large and uncompressed. Some even have 70+ requests being sent for additional content on 10-20 different domains. They are slow and hog bandwidth … Shared hosting easily rivals content distribution backed websites when properly configured.