on the topic of the homeworth site, we now know a few things about the web server serving this content:
- it uses SSL
- it checks for particular "user agents" (i.e. in most cases, this means your browser)
- it requires that the client store and return cookies
in order to handle these cases, we are in the process of making a web server with an enhanced version of PHP installed. the enhancement involves software called CURL (
http://curl.haxx.se/). this added functionality in the PHP language will allow you to deal with these complications. point your browser at
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.curl.php for information on the PHP-CURL interface. you'll need to do at least the following tasks using this interface:
- force the SSL version to version 2; the server doesn't appear to always correctly negotiate between version 2 and 3.
- tell CURL to follow URL redirections
- tell CURL to masquerade as an "acceptable" browser
- retrieve, store, and send cookies
if you take some time to learn the PHP-CURL interface, you'll be in good shape when the server is up.
