Good day my fellow Bitcoiners. I figured I should share a simple little script I made for fetching the Mt. Gox ticker data using PHP. I'll also teach you how to automate it using Cron Jobs. I hope this will be useful to some of you.

You should not use a script that sends a request to Mt. Gox every time the page is loaded. That is very bad practice because it puts unnecessary strain on Mt. Gox and your pages will take longer to load all the time.

The solution is to create a stand-alone script that fetches the ticker data and saves it to a file and/or into a database. You then set up something like Cron Jobs to fire the script at your preferred intervals of time.

One hour is about the minimum amount of time you should wait before each request. The script uses the PHP cURL function to retrieve the ticker data and then simply writes it to a file. Saving the data to a database is optional.

If you wish to know more about the script you can simply download it and check the source out yourself (see bottom of post for download). Now lets move on to automation, which is where some people can get stuck.

If you have cPanel you can easily set up Cron Jobs to automate a task. The time stuff is pretty self-explanatory, it dictates the period between each time the script will run. The command part is where you need to input the following:

php -q /home/serverpath/goxgrab/mtgox_update.php

All you need to do is change the first part "/home/serverpath/" to the correct location to your "goxgrab" folder (after you upload it; you might want to install the script before setting up Cron Jobs - see the install.txt file), then submit the Cron Job.

The included mtgox_stats.php file shows you how to extract the ticker data from your local copy and save it as an associative array. This file can easily be included into other scripts that need access to the Mt. Gox ticker data.

Download the project from bitfreak.co.cc: GoxGrab

All feedback is welcome, especially about bugs or suggestions. Donations are also appreciated.  

NEXT TIME: Using HTML5 to graph ticker data!

EDIT: Just did some heavy updates. If you have downloaded it already, I suggest you do it again, unless you already figured out how to make the mtgox_stats.php file work properly.

Hello people's.

You don't want to get the value each time a page is loaded. What you want to do is get the value every hour or every day or something like that, and save it to a database or file. The way I achieved this was to create a PHP script which extracts the ticker info from Mt. Gox and saves it to a file and/or into a database. Next I used Cron Jobs to make the script run automatically every two hours.

I will write a thread that describes how to do this (and provide the project code). BUT FIRST I need a little bit of help. My script was running smoothly until after the Mt. Gox crash. Now that Mt. Gox is back online my script still doesn't seem to be working. I checked the Mt. Gox ticker file manually and it seemed to be providing the json data as it should.

So that led me to believe maybe they were filtering out some of the headers. I was initially using the simple file_get_contents() function to retrieve the ticker data, so I decided to try the cURL functions and modify the header information to spoof my user agent. But that didn't seem to work either. Any help will be appreciated!  

EDIT: Do not worry peoples, I have figured it out! I am writing up a thread on this now. I hope people will find it useful.

EDIT: Here you go: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=22886.0

BTW, if anyone experiences any difficulties of encounters any bugs on any of my websites, please use this thread to let me know. Or alternatively, just use the contact form on the website.

Interesting choice of words. I guess it is all looking rather tight.

Thank you for the input. 

I thought the design was quite good myself. Not too over the top, but still appealing. It does need a bit of touching up and refinement though. The content on the other hand is my major problem. I don't have the money to hire girls to produce original videos, that is beyond me. I might be able to pay for original amateur videos. I'll wait till I have a bit more a Bitcoin pile built up first.  

@ the OP. Let me clear some things up for you. It would be quite simple for a programmer to create a porn website that integrates with Bitcoin. The MyBitcoin SCI is actually fairly easy to implement, and it allows for transactions quite similar to PayPal. This talk of thousands and thousands of dollars is completely ridiculous and is engineered to deter you from progress imo. I reckon I could create a decent Bitcoin cam website for around 1K USD (with help obviously).

An adult webcam site could be extremely profitable and popular, because customers would have anonymity. Stick with it. And also, do not buy one of those ridiculous expensive "adult CMS" platforms. That is completely retarded. Anyone who knows what they are doing can easily program an adult website from scratch, this isn't rocket science. A webcam site will be slightly more complicated, but still try to avoid commercial CMS platforms.

Thank you.

Who's asking, LeFBI?   It's just a website where you can download porn. It's no more "legit" than a gambling website.

I thought about it and I might do it at a later stage, when I have more content and more traffic.

That's a good idea too, and I probably will create something like that soon. But a problem is having explicit stuff on the home page. I like having the warning text on the landing, that way they know what they're heading into.

Those little preview pics are all there are, I'm afraid. It already takes too long to watermark and upload videos as it is. If they want more, they know how to get it.  

Mmmm, I think it's ok how it is. Can't be bothered changing it now. I want to work on the code as much as possible, graphics design isn't really my strong point. I just sort of use simple but effective techniques. edit: oh, you mean in the actual videos. It is a bit big, and I might re-encode them as you said, with just the website address in the corner.

Nah, wetcoin is just a random conglomerate of porn videos. It's unlikely we'd ever get more than 3 videos off the same girl.

No, I paid a reasonable sum of money for the videos I have on there. I bought them on a freelancer website under the specific conditions I would be able to sell them and that they had to be unmarked so I could apply my own watermarks to them. So I've done all I can, I have provided clear ways for webmasters to contact me if they think I've uploaded copyrighted material.

I thought it was about time that I introduced my personal Bitcoin project to the forum. So far this is a completely solo project coded and designed entirely be me, including graphics design. If anyone wants to get involved that would be cool, but I'm not really seeking extra help at the moment. One of the main things people might find particularly useful are the Bitcoin Tools or the Bitcoin merchant buttons I've made. You can find all the high quality examples on this page.









Bitfreak is actually part of a network of sites I'm developing (the bitfreak network  ), with the main goal of providing fun and practical ways to use Bitcoins and stimulate the Bitcoin economy.

Regards,
bitfreak!

Haha. Well said sir. You guys want to see a working example of a Bitcoin porn site. Here you go: http://wetcoin.co.cc
I made it in like 4 fucking days entirely by myself. The co.cc domain was free. I simply host it as an add-on domain to one of my existing hosting accounts. So the whole thing basically cost me nothing. Except for the porn videos, which were cheap anyway. And I've basically made that back now anyway. I do need some more videos though.

Note: you obviously wont be able to be a cheap ass like me when it comes to a hosting a cam site though.

Sorry to waste your time my friend, but I think I have it sorted out.
I should have a BCM account soon.  Thanks for the offer anyway.

Hmmmm...I can't seem to make out some of the letters on your Bitcoin address. You're going to have to get a much higher quality shot I'm afraid.

I am looking to buy a bitcoinmarket.com invite for 0.035 BTC. Or if you're feeling nice just donate me an invite I have over $100 USD and I want to test out BCM. I have an eBay account with over 80 feedback, it's 100% positive (I can prove). Contact me via PM if you can help me out.

Regards,
GreenHat

11:11 GMT June 26th

Being open source, I think someone would have noticed if the Bitcoin software was programmed to scrape our HDD's for info.

I always did wonder about the enormity of the hashing power generated by Bitcoin though. It could be used to achieve awesome feats even if only a portion of the total hashing power could be periodically siphoned off.

I was thinking the exact same thing. One second I can make a thread, the next I can't. They should have left all existing members as full members. There have to be spam circumvention mods for SMF that work better this.   Anyhoo, if I may regain my access to post in other forums it would be appreciated. I am working on a set of Bitcoin websites with my HQ residing here: bitfreak.co.cc

Sorry to bump my own thread, but an answer would be helpful.

I was just looking at this page: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MyBitcoin_SCI and it states all the values returned by mybitcoin, but it's very vague about the 'SCI Code' value, it just says 'Code value'. Doesn't the SCI Code lets me know whether the transaction succeeded or not? Does anyone know what the return values are?

EDIT:

And also, lets say I pass some data in the baggage variable: &baggage=blah
And I use $response['SCI Baggage Field'] to access the baggage data, what would it look like?
And here's a better question, does mybitcoin has some sort of sandbox for testing?

So I still need to install Bitcoin on the web server?

Is there a public server I can use or something?

I am very new at this whole Bitcoin thing, but I love it too!