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My name is Rick Tuttle. I'm a web developer living in Miami Beach, Florida. After working in the corporate IT industry for over 15 years I ventured out to start my own little web shop, Papasoft in 2005. Dreamhost Gotcha
I have moved a lot of my sites over to Dreamhost and have been pretty satisfied so far. The control panel is very good and you can do some neat one-click installs of popular open-source packages like WordPress.
Today I had my first PHP Gotcha on Dreamhost.
I am working on a site that uses Google Maps and I decided to try out Phoogle Maps, a PHP script that integrates Google Maps with your PHP application and also does GeoCoding based on an address. I tested the script on my dev server and everything worked great. I then started working on the rest of the app.
After uploading the scripts to Dreamhost I got an error that file_get_contents() was not allowed. After looking into it I found out that Dreamhost has disabled file_get_contents() for security reasons. Phoogle calls the Yahoo Geocoding API (since Google doesn’t provide one) and used the file_get_contents() method of doing the REST call to Yahoo. I checked out Yahoo’s developer site and found out that they also support curl() but after banging my head against the wall trying to retrofit Phoogle to use that method I looked elsewhere.
First I tried using XML-RPC to call the geocoder.us database but that was extremely slow. Then I stumbled upon ontok.com which provides a geocoding API. I grabbed their example code using SOAP and it was pretty fast and I then proceeded to hack Phroogle to call ontok.com for it’s geocoding.
So, I’m still on Dreamhost until something else doesn’t work.
Comments (2)
Did you ever get a solution? I’m attempting the same thing on Dreamhost (with WordPress and Phoogle) and was wondering if you solved the problem…
As far as I know there is no solution using Phoogle without modification since it uses file_get_contents (which Dreamhost does not allow).
I was able to use ontok.com and nusoap.php as described at http://www.ontok.com/wiki/index.php/Geocode#PHP.
I modified the addAddress() function in Phoogle as follows (make sure to get nusoap.php and include it in the file). This replaces the same code that used file_get_contents:
$server = "www.ontok.com"; // subscribers are emailed a private server with faster response times $key = ""; // free users do not need key (limit 10 addresses), subscribers w/key (limit 200 addresses) $q = array($address); $soapclient = new soapclient("http://$server/geocode/soap"); $result = $soapclient->call("geocode", array('key'=> $key, 'q'=> $q), "", ""); $pointer = count($this->validPoints); $this->validPoints[$pointer]['lat']= $result[0]['lat']; $this->validPoints[$pointer]['long']= $result[0]['long']; $this->validPoints[$pointer]['passedAddress'] = $address; $this->validPoints[$pointer]['htmlMessage'] = $htmlMessage;