Illuminati Karate, Inc.

Finding the Carrier of a Cell Phone Number in PHP

June 20, 2011

Often web apps need to send SMS messages to their users (for example: balance alerts, reminders, notifications). To send these text messages from within your app, you basically have 2 options:

1) Pay Twilio and Tropo for the use of their APIs, for roughly a penny per message.

2) Send an email directly to their carrier’s mail-to-SMS gateway – a free service most carriers provide, which will translate your email into an SMS sent to their subscribers’ phone

Twilio and Tropo are about as easy as it gets to integrate (REST-like APIs that return JSON/POX), but you pay for every single message and that can add up quickly. So #2 (mail-to-SMS gateways) starts to look pretty good.

But there’s some problems with mail-to-SMS gateways: (more…)

Facebook Graph API requires Access Token for Feed Access

June 14, 2011

On June 3rd, Facebook updated the Graph API to require an access token to pull wall post data from public Facebook pages. This change can cause scripts to stop working, so here is a quick solution to pull wall post data from public Facebook pages with an access token. (more…)

Free Webservice to Geocode IP Addresses Saves The Day

May 23, 2009

At Illuminati Karate we love a challenge. So when our client called needing two lists of 1500 IP addresses geocoded as quickly as possible, we rose to the occasion. With the help of PHP and a freely available web service we were able to complete the task in just under an hour. Here’s how we did it.

(more…)