How to post to Leeds using PHP and fsockopen. Where do I get a 'AUTHTOKEN' to add to my code?

How to post to Leeds using PHP and fsockopen. Where do I get a 'AUTHTOKEN' to add to my code?

To start with I just want to say I'm sure Zoho is a great company with a lot of very hard working employees but I am new here and after 13 days of researching, coding, testing, failing and going back just to start the whole process over again I've had it.  If I don't get an answer here to my questions, completely, fully, unambiguously I'm going to have to just pull my client from this service and you can be sure I wont be bringing you guys any new customers in the future.  Sorry to be so harsh but ..... 13 days!   I'm veeeery tired and frustrated now.  I put my time in, now lets see how much you care about helping your customers and keeping them.  (This is obviously just directed to the Zoho staff guys.  But if anyone else can help me out I'd very much appreciate it.)

End of rant, problem starts here...

I'm building a form that submits it's content, via Ajax, to a server running PHP.  I do what I need with the data locally first then I need to connect to Zoho and add it to the 'Leeds' database for my client.

Issue
-  I can not use Curl, I have to connect manually using fsockopen().  Are there any examples of that anywhere?
-  What URI should I be calling from my server to Zoho and do I have to validate that connection to my clients account?  If that involves Tokens where in the Zoho admin system do I get that?
-  On this page  https://www.zoho.com/crm/help/api/examples.html#2._Fetch_Records_from_the there is code for pulling records out of the leads table, but how do you Post to it?  (And where do I get the ' AUTHTOKEN' from?)

Thank you to anyone that can just post me some straight forward code, I'm tired of the Easter Egg hunt.

Vince