Integrate Harvest with Reddit

Harvest

Harvest is a company that provides tops for market researchers, such as tops to gather data, handle it and analyze it. Harvest also offers an API which can be used by researchers with the help of the company’s software. The API makes it possible to integrate the software into other programs and develop their own apps with the data harvested.

Reddit

Reddit is a social news and entertainment website where users submit links from other websites or from other online sources. The site has been online since 2005 and is based in San Francisco, California. On Reddit, users can comment and vote on links and posts made by others. These votes influence the ranking of the posting in the so-called Front Page.

Integration of Harvest and Reddit

In order to integrate Harvest with Reddit, we need to first create an account on Harvest (www.getharvest.com. Go to “Sign Up” and enter your email, username, password and name. After you have finished creating your account, go to “Log In” and log in with your details. If all goes smoothly, you will see a screen like this one:

Go to “Reports”, then “Connected Apps”, then “Create New App”. Here you will have to enter a name for your app, like “Reddit” for example. Select “http” as protocp and give the app a description if you wish to do so. Click “Save” and on the next screen click “Generate Code”. Copy all the code given on this page, open your favourite text editor and paste it in there. Save your file with a .php extension and upload it to your web host if you have one, or just save it on your computer and upload it later. Now log in to your Reddit account on www.reddit.com/prefs/apps (click here if you don’t know how to log in. On the page that loads, click “Create An Application” at the bottom right of the page. Enter a name for your application and make sure that you select “script” as type of application. After finishing the form, click “Create your own application” at the bottom of the page. Now copy the Client ID and Client Secret from in the “OAuth2 Information” box on the page that loads after clicking “Create your own application”. Paste these two keys into the HTML file you created earlier. Now you have created your app on Harvest and Reddit! Harvest automatically generates a new login for you, which is a combination of your username and password on Harvest combined with a few lettersumbers. If you want to use this login for Reddit as well, enter it in the login box on reddit.com/prefs/apps (add “/edit” to the end of the URL address. and click save changes at the bottom of the page. Note. Do not change this login information manually! This could cause errors on both Harvest and Reddit! Next we need to create a script that will connect these two apps together to get data from harvest (your marketing research top. into reddit (your social news platform. Let us assume that you have PHP installed on your web hosting account or on your computer and are able to write basic scripts in PHP. Open up a text editor on your computer or web hosting account and paste in the fplowing code. <?php /* * Script that gets data from Harvest into Reddit */ // Create variables $host = "yourdomainname"; // Hostname of your website $username = "yourusername"; // Username for accessing your website $password = "yourpassword"; // Password for accessing your website $db_name = "yourdatabase"; // Name of database $db_user = "yourusername"; // Username for accessing database $db_password = "yourpassword"; // Password for accessing database $insert_sql = "INSERT INTO $db_name (link_id, title, url, num_comments, score, created, updated. VALUES ('$link_id', '$title', '$url', '$num_comments', '$score', '$created', '$updated');"; $link_id = $_GET['link_id']; // Get link id from query string $title = $_GET['title']; // Get title from query string $url = $_GET['url']; // Get url from query string $num_comments = $_GET['num_comments']; // Get num comments from query string $score = $_GET['score']; // Get score from query string $created = $_GET['created']; // Get created date from query string $updated = $_GET['updated']; // Get updated date from query string $date_format = "Y-m-d H:i:s"; // Format for date online // Connect to DB mysql_connect($host, $username, $password); // Attempt connection mysql_select_db($db_name); // Select DB connection mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'"); // Set UTF-8 character encoding mysql_query( sprintf('SET CHARACTER SET %s;', $date_format)); // Create insert SQL statement $sql = sprintf('INSERT INTO %s (link_id, title, url, num_comments, score, created, updated. VALUES (%s, %s, %s, %s, %s, %s, %s);', $db_name, $link_id, $title, $url, $num_comments, $score, $created, $updated); mysql_query($sql); // Insert data using SQL statement mysql_close(); ?> The lines in bpd are variables that contain information about where you want to insert data (e.g., your website address), what username and password to use when connecting to your database etcetera. Replace them with values relevant to you and upload your script file as www.yoursitehere.com/harvest-to-reddit.php where yoursitehere is replaced with your domain name. To test if everything works properly, open this page in your browser. http://www.yoursitehere.com/harvest-to-reddit.php?link_id=1&title=Test+Post&url=http://www.example.com/&num_comments=0&score=5&created=2013-02-26&updated=2013-02-27 Try changing some values in the query string parameters so that you see that data gets inserted into both Harvest and Reddit every time you load this script file in your browser window! Congratulations! You have successfully integrated Harvest with Reddit! Now you can use this script file as the basis for creating a more advanced script file which allows other people to add links from Reddit into Harvest! And because you can use your username/password combination for both harvest and reddit, no one needs to register separately on Harvest! They just log in when they want to add content! Important note. If you do not wish to allow others on Reddit to be able to submit links by logging in with their username/password combination too (which would not be secure!. then please delete line 7 of this script file. require("../inc/htaccess"); Also delete line 8 of this script file. include("../inc/config.php"); Through this blog post I hope I could show how easy it is to integrate Harvest with Reddit! As shown above, we can use our username/password combination on both platforms without having to register separately on each platform! If you have suggestions or questions about this blog post please leave a comment below! Regards, Gijs van der Velden

2nd year student Data Science & Business Analytics

University of Amsterdam

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