Thu, 4 May 2006 14:53 UTC
The other day, I came across Scott Johnson’s PHP OPML Reading List. Offering an OPML reading list for others to download is a great idea, and, since I’ve not yet blogged about it, I wanted to point out that I’ve been doing this for a long while now. On my home page, under the “syndicate” heading, is a link to my OPML blogroll. Feel free to import my OPML into your feed reader; that’s what it’s there for. (Please also note that I use SimpleXML to generate the blogroll on my home page from this list.)
There’s a lot of overlap between Scott’s and my list; however, I think both lists provide a good overview of some of the great PHP bloggers out there—and I know there are many more than are on these lists, as pointed out by Chris.
In other news, the PHP development team released PHP 5.1.3 earlier this week, and, shortly thereafter, a user reported a critical bug with data in the $_POST array when submitting from a multi-part form. As of right now, there is no official release update posted on the PHP downloads page, but Chris provides a link to download the 5.1.4 source from a mirror.
I’ve already compiled and updated from the new source, and I encourage you to do the same.
UPDATE (5/5/06 4:30 UTC): The PHP team has made an official announcement concerning the 5.1.4 release on their Web site and have updated the downloads page.
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Tags: blogging, community, feed-reader, opml, php, xml
Sun, 30 Apr 2006 19:28 UTC
Jim Plush’s recent blog post “The Soon to be PHP Boom” reminded me of my October 2005 post “What’s Good for Zend is Good for PHP.” In that post, I observed—from comments made by Marc Andreessen in the Wall Street Journal and Zend’s involvement in the Enterprise—that “the forecast for PHP looks bright and sunny.”
Indeed, if Jim’s post is any indication, that future is getting brighter and sunnier.
Jim lists some ways for up-and-coming PHP programmers to hone their skills and get noticed. I’d like to add one additional thing to it: blog, blog, blog! Start a blog and begin taking part in the PHP blogosphere by offering your opinions and experience to the PHP community. In addition (and, perhaps, more importantly), read the blogs of other PHP developers. A good place to start is to take a look at the blogroll on my home page.
It may take a while (and, generally, in the PHP community, it doesn’t take very long), but you will soon be noticed, and potential employers will be able to find you easily through search engines (as Jim suggested). From my experience, starting a blog about PHP is a quick and easy way to make connections and network with others. You simply need to start and make it a regular habit to blog—unlike the near silence I’ve had over the past six months.
I think the number of PHP jobs will only grow over the next few years, as middle-to-upper management folks begin to realize the value of PHP—or, if anything, they begin to realize that PHP is a buzzword they need to add to their repertoire of tools.
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Tags: blogging, community, jobs, php, zend
Mon, 6 Sep 2004 23:19 UTC
I attended “America’s largest, multi-media, popular arts convention,” Dragon*Con, this weekend. I went a few years back, so it was a privilege for me to go again this year. There are all sorts of tracks and panels focusing on a wide variety of topics. My favorites include the TrekTrak and the Tolkien Track hosted by TheOneRing.net. However, I noticed a track by the name of Electronic Frontiers Forums, hosted by the (now defunct?) Electronic Frontiers Georgia group, which is associated with the EFF. While they offered a wide variety of panels covering such topics as “Web Cam Girls” and the “FCC Broadcast Flag,” they didn’t offer much discussion on more technical topics for the hard core programmer. Still, their discussions on Web culture did intrigue me, and since sociology and Web culture are among my interests, I managed to make it to the “My So-Called LiveJournal (.com)” panel.
Now, I knew from the title that this discussion would probably be more of a get-together for journalers to chat and compare experiences using LiveJournal. So, for starters, I didn’t exactly fit the LiveJournal mold. I’m more of a “blogger” than a “journaler,” and what I mean by that is this distinction: I don’t talk about my day-to-day life on this blog, nor am I part of a community of other bloggers. I have a blog roll, which is similar to the LiveJournal friends listings, but there seems to be more of a widespread community phenomen going on with LiveJournal and other journaling services. So, I didn’t fit in with the group.
Secondly, my interest in the discussion was purely sociological. I wanted to hear about the culture of blogging, probably from too much of an academic standpoint. But the discussion seemed bent on the usage of emoticons and factors in choosing friends. Still, while a trained sociologist would’ve undoubtedly found these topics interesting from a mere bystander’s point of view, I did not. I wanted to dig deeper to find out how these people felt about some real blogging issues, so I decided to ask a few questions.
My first question was fairly simple: “How did you first encounter blogging? What was your first experience with blogging?” The answers were also simple, if not trite. Someone told me about it, was the basic consensus. While I didn’t expect rocket science, I had hoped to hear something more anecdotal about the panelists’ experiences. This also would’ve been an excellent opportunity for the panel to open the floor for blogging stories from the audience, but it was quickly tabled for more questions.
I next asked for their feelings about corporations, such as Microsoft, using the blogging model as a way to promote and publicize key positions and products of the company and, at the same time, giving consumers a false sense of closeness to the corporation. The panelists, as well as most people in the room (and it was a standing-room-only crowd), didn’t seem familiar with this at all. I have seen countless blogs across the Internet that discuss this topic, and I have read articles about how this movement by corporations has angered bloggers for taking the blog from them and turning it into something corporate. Yet these bloggers—LiveJournalers, rather—did not seem to have any knowledge of this, nor did they seem too concerned. The attitude was more of a “f*ck ‘em” and let’s move on to the next question.
I had several other comments throughout the discussion, but my final question was about Joyce Park’s termination from Friendster for blogging and how they felt about that. Again, they were as uninformed about this as about the corporate blogging—and this is a topic that reverberated across the entire Web in a matter of hours.
I left the panel asking myself how the Electronic Frontier Forums, who had held a well-thought-out panel on the FCC broadcast flag hosted by the knowledgeable Paul Scheele, could host a panel that provided no real insight into a blogger’s feelings about major issues in blogging. Yes, there were some good moments and a few interesting lines of discussion, but overall, I felt the panel was merely an excuse for users of LiveJournal to meet each other, and perhaps that was its sole purpose. If so, it suceeded, but if it could’ve aspired to be more about social issues faced by bloggers, then it failed because these bloggers were uninformed and out-of-touch with the rest of the on-line blogging community.
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Tags: blogging, dragoncon, livejournal
Sat, 24 Jul 2004 15:02 UTC
Yes, it’s true. I have succumbed to the level of blogging about not blogging. It’s the lowest form of the blog.
Things have been very busy lately. I have some content that’s going to be published in the near future, but I will wait until it’s published to mention what it is.
In the meantime, I have been working with the PHP-GTK project and helping to improve their Web site. Others are working on this initiative for both the Web site and the documentation, but I’ll post more about that later.
For now, I’ll just acknowledge my inactive blog by saying thanks to Chris Shiflett, who pointed out the other day that he was responsible for getting me listed on Planet PHP, and I haven’t posted a damn thing since. This is for you, Chris—and I’m still finding it hard to switch to one space after a period at the end of a sentence. High school English teachers should go back to grammar school!
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Tags: blogging, php-gtk
