Three years ago today, I published my first Getting Started with Zend Framework tutorial. This was the announcement. Back then, Zend Framework was at version 0.1.5 and a considerably smaller download than now :)
Three years later and I haven't lost my enthusiasm for Zend Framework as you can tell since the latest version of the tutorial supports ZF 1.8 and 1.9 and uses the new features like Zend_Application and the command line Zend_Tool scripts. And I wrote a Zend Framework book!
I wonder what will happen in the next three years?!
By default, the shorter url is simply {your domain}/{post id}, but the plugin also creates a custom field called "Shorter link" once a post is saved, so that you can change the shorter link to a more memorable set of characters.
Rather handily, Simon Willison, has produced a bookmarklet called Shorten so you can find out if the page you are looking at has a shorter link or not.
As an example, my Zend Framework Tutorial page has a canonical URL of http://akrabat.com/zend-framework-tutorial. I have set up a Shorter Link of http://akrabat.com/zft which will redirect to the correct page. The <link> tag for this is: <link rev="canonical" rel="alternate shorter" href="http://akrabat.com/zft" />
The DiggBar is a URL shortening service that puts your website within a frame on digg.com. As a result, the user sees Digg's URL, rather than your URL in their address bar, no matter which page they navigate to on your site.
I don't particularly like this, so I've written a small plugin for WordPress that removes it. Go to the No DiggBar page to download it.
One thing that I've noticed is that whenever I used -- in a post, such as this one, WordPress converted the -- to &emdash; which whilst very pretty doesn't work so well for people trying to understand command line switches to ./configure!
Today, I finally got around to poking into the WP source code to work out what was happening and I tracked it down to the wptexturize function in the wp-includes/functions-formatting.php file. Once I knew the name, it was trivial to google for a solution and I found Jason Litka's Disable wptexturize plugin. I couldn't find it through WordPress' new built-in plugin installer, so I installed it the old-fashioned way and now the code in my posts will make more sense!
I'm kind of neglecting this blog at the moment. Sorry.
I was away last week and I'm head down into editing Zend Framework in Action. It's amazing how many details the technical proof reader and our copy editor have found. The book is going to be so much better as a result. I need to go through each suggestion though and ensure that the meaning hasn't changed and to implement the suggested technical changes.
When I get a little time, I'll try and write up what I've learnt recently about testing with Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase which has reduced the testing scaffolding that I had by around 50% or so.
Just a heads-up. Tomorrow, this site is being moved to a new server and so is going to be down for most of tomorrow from around 10:00 (GMT) to late evening.
Just a quick note to warn you that the server that akrabat.com runs on is going to be upgraded tomorrow, so expect serious downtime as we see what happens when you go from FC-old to FC6 !
All should be back up and running by the evening though!
Thought, I'd have a go at understanding WordPress themes! The image at the top is an actual road sign on my way to work, which has unfortunately been removed by the council.
If you see anything broken, let me know please as I've only actually tested this in Firefox! (I know it's broken in IE...)
