This was screaming out to be screen-scraped and developer Tyler Hall has stepped up to the plate with Sosumi – A MobileMe Scraper. Using Sosumi is literally a case of including the class in your PHP, instantiating it with your MobileMe username and password and calling its locate method which returns an object containing the current latitude, longitude and result accuracy, it’s as simple as that!

At the moment I’ve got a cron job on my server hitting this every five minutes and logging to a database. If the data hasn’t changed since the last logged entry, a counter is incremented and timestamp_last is set. A very simple Google Map displays these locations as points on a map but I’ve got loads of ideas of stuff to play about with, such as:

• Plot the reported accuracy of each location as a circle on the map, more Google Maps fiddling.
• Modify which points are mapped based on time and date ranges through the webpage, some PHP + AJAX experience.
• Store locations of common places I visit, then for each point logged (taking into account the accuracy range) I can programatically work out where I am.  Could then auto-generate “Richard is at work”, “Richard is at home”, etc… reports for my blog/twitter/facebook etc… =).

Bit sad I know, but it seemed too good for a total sync-monkey like myself and I’ll never pass up an opportunity, however contrived, for a PHP mash-up!

Finally I came across Johann Hanne’s port of the Perl Spreadsheet::WriteExcel module on his website and it’s working brilliantly without any additional dependencies! Although his documentation is a little thin on the ground, he does provide some example scripts to get you going and as it’s a direct port, you can still refer to the original Perl documentation. In particular the reference pages on cell number format strings here and here were most useful when tweaking the output.

Creating a simple spreadsheet in PHP is as simple as importing the writeexcel classes and setting up a new workbook and worksheet:

require_once "class.writeexcel_workbook.inc.php";
require_once "class.writeexcel_worksheet.inc.php";

$fname = tempnam("/tmp", "simple.xls");
$workbook = &new writeexcel_workbook($fname);
$worksheet = &$workbook->addworksheet();

…then use the write($row, $column, $token) function to put values into cells:

# Write some text
$worksheet->write(0, 0,  "Hi Excel!");
# Write some numbers
$worksheet->write(1, 0,  3);

…and tidy up and return it, in this example through the browser, but you could always copy the file from the /tmp folder to somewhere more permanent and do what you want with it:

$workbook->close();
header("Content-Type: application/x-msexcel; name=\"example.xls\"");
header("Content-Disposition: inline; filename=\"example.xls\"");
$fh=fopen($fname, "rb");
fpassthru($fh);
unlink($fname);

…and there you go, automatically generated Excel spreadsheets through PHP.