Sjoerd Maessen blog

For a project I’m working, I needed to get shipping rates from the UPS API (a blog post about this will follow soon).

The problem I ran into was that the UPS API returns the shipping rates with the currency of the country where the rates for are asked, so you can’t force it to always return the rates in EUR.

One solution to convert the prices is to make a very big array with all currency rates in it. I then would maintain the array every day at 9’o clock to check if the rates weren’t changed. Right, that’s not an option.
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I was asked to place Twitter messages with product links when new products were added to a webshop. I’ve used my own Twitter class for posting the first test Tweet then I went looking for a shorten url a service to shorten the product links.

There are many url shorten services available on the internet, one of these services is Bitly.
The reasons why I’ve chosen Bitly:
– Urls don’t expire after a period of time.
– Bitly provides a click url summary (although Google Analytics can be used for this instead)
– Urls are short in length so i could use the remaining Tweet length for a small product description.
– And more important, they provide an easy to use API.
– Authentication does not require a password, we can use our API key instead.
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