Pragmatism in the real world
This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. One benefit for Microsoft with this competition is that all the participants have to blog about their experiences. This should gain MS some exposure, though I wonder how much will be negative from those of us more familiar with nix.… continue reading.
This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. For some insane reason, I decided to enter the WinPHP Challenge and having been accepted, I now need to actually write an app! It's not like I'm not already way too busy or anything… The main reason that I decided… continue reading.
Hot on the heels of my No DiggBar, I've created another extension for WordPress! Shorter Links provides a <link> tag in the <head> section of your page with a shorter url and appropriate tags for use with the new revCanonical system. Further details can be found at laughingmeme.org, shiflett.org or benramsey.com. The link created looks like this: By default, the shorter url is simply {your domain}/{post id}, but the plugin also creates a custom field… continue reading.
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. Tip of the hat to John Gruber for… continue reading.
The Dutch PHP Conference is being held in mid-June in Amsterdam and I'm speaking at it! My talk is called Caching for performance and in it I'll be looking at how to use caching to improve the performance of a website. I decided to talk about this topic is that it's something that our customers have started asking about. I've started getting questions from clients asking how we can increase the speed of the their… continue reading.
Zend_Application is now in the incubator and being actively developed for version 1.8 of Zend Framework. I've had a little play using it with a standard ZF application with no modules and this is what I've worked out so far. As a result this post rambles a bit; sorry about that. Zend_Application is intended to make bootstrapping your application easier, presumably with less code. It also has a new autoloader, Zend_Loader_Autoloader, but I haven't worked… continue reading.
As today is Ada Lovelace Day, I get to write about a women who has inspired me and isn't my wife! I first met Alison on the Electronic and Electrical Engineering course at University back in 1991. Of course, that dates me; Freddie Mercury was still alive and died towards the end of '91. I remember her from our Uni days as conscientious and determined to do well, though I did not know her very… continue reading.
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… continue reading.
I use Twitter's search feature to create RSS feeds for useful terms, like "Zend Framework". Today I noticed a tweet from ManningBooks, my publisher for Zend Framework in Action! It turns out that they've put up a sample of the book on Scribed! Check out the book, then order it, remembering to use the coupon code scribd25…
Everyone else probably already knows this stuff, but I hit an issue today to that took a while to sort out. Fortunately, some kind folks on IRC helped me, but as it's embarrassing to ask for help on the same issue twice, I'm writing down what I've learned! The problem Get a £ character stored to MySQL, retrieved and then displayed without any weird characters in front of it using UTF-8. The solution Make sure… continue reading.
