Month: May 2013

I wrote an easy to use API for displaying cute animal pictures on any webpage.The API uses my website iGoAww.com, and chooses a random picture from amongst tens of thousands of adorable animal pictures.

To use this free API, just request http://www.igoaww.com/api.php, and a JSON string will be returned containing the image URL and caption.

This is an example:

{“url”:”http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/ElNcPxF.jpg”,”caption”:”My parents got a new dog. We named it Bruce.”}

You can use the following code to parse the JSON and display the resulting HTML:

[code lang=’php]
$jsonString = file_get_contents(“http://www.igoaww.com/api.php”);
$jsonArray = json_decode($jsonString, true);
$imageUrl = $jsonArray[‘url’];
$caption = $jsonArray[‘caption’];
echo “<br>While we work to fix it, we hope you enjoy this cute animal picture!<br>
Courtesy of <a href=’http://www.igoaww.com’>iGoAww.com</a><br>
<img style=’max-height: 700px; max-width: 700px;’ src=’$imageUrl’><br>$caption”;[/code]

Class enrollment can be extremely frustrating! If the class fills up before you get a chance to enroll you are stuck refreshing the page every few minutes until someone decides to drop the class. Now there is a better solution that automates the process for you – Alertification.com. Instead of having to manually refresh the page until a class opens, Alertification does the painstaking task for you, and sends you a text message or email when the class is finally open! Enrolling in classes just got easier! Alertification works at most colleges in the US, especially at large schools like UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UCSB, and even USC!

By Brian Roizen

There are countless forums where you can get random people to calculate your chances of getting into certain colleges, but these aren’t accurate at all due to bias and inexperience of the forum members. Not only do you have to wait hours if not days for a response, but you also can’t get estimates at more than a few schools because it’d take too much time for someone to give you a free response.

To solve these problems, I created CalculateMyChances.  Just enter your new SAT score (out of 2400), and you will instantly get reasonably good feedback on your chances of getting into hundreds of different colleges. Included are your odds of getting into all the Ivys – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, and even schools like Stanford, UCLA, and UC Berkeley! Before I made the site there were a few other services that estimated your chances, but I found their implementation either poor or annoying to use. The frustrating ones asked you to sign up for their service, which simply wasn’t worth the effort. The others were created by those lacking even the most basic understanding of statistics and were completely inaccurate. Try out CalculateMyChances and let me know how you like it in the comments!

By Brian Roizen