As I am sure all of you know, Shaun Inman released his new pet project Mint, a stats package that is supposedly revolutionary. I have been dying to try it ever since I saw the write up on it at Mike Davidson's Blog. So I rush over there as soon as I hear its out, and hes getting slammed with traffic so there is no demo. Bummer. So I think, its just 30 bucks, why don't I just buy it. So I download the compatability test, because although I develop in coldFusion, I do host a few php sites on my box. The compatability test said I was fine with everything except for one minor detail, I didn't have something called cURL, whatever that is. (I do understand what it is, but I just dont care to). Bummer again. So I just tried to forget about it. But then today I was looking through some comments somewhere and found someone saying that he had removed the curl necessity. I rushed over, downloaded the compatability test again, and sure enough, it says im good to go. So if anyone else is seeing cURL as a hinderance, don't let that stop you any longer. Im going to do a few more checks to make sure, but I am probably going to be purchasing it later today. If so I will do a write up soon!
Mint loses its cURLs
Posted on Wed. September 07, 2005 by Ryan Guill
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cURL is originally a command line tool for http/ftp etc protocols (http://curl.haxx.se/). In PHP there's cURL module that brings powerful cURL API into PHP. It's the preferred way to do HTTP calls inside PHP (and probably the only viable way to to HTTPS calls in PHP). Anyway, cURL as a command line tool is very useful for regular web development also. Need to quickly test a form POST but not in a mood to create a HTML dummy form for it? Just "curl -F fieldname=value fieldname2=value http://your.url.here/" and you have your POST right there. Stick -i option in and you'll see all returned headers in the output. So cURL is very useful little tool you can add to your web toolbelt.
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Hey, did you buy Mint yet. I'm using Mint at www.stephencollins.org and it probably tracks all the stats I'll ever need - particularly if you add a little Pepper into the mix (there are some great Peppers available from the Mint forums). Best $30 I ever spent on my site.