Elizabeth's Blog

My love/hate relationship with Google continues, I fear. While I hate to see them taking over the world, and I hate that they have access to so much of my personal information, I can’t seem to break free from the hold of convenience they have over me. As I’ve posted before, I reluctantly use quite a few of their services. The fact of the matter is, you just can’t argue with results. Everything they do just seems to work better than the alternatives out there. And they continue to make my life easier.

I read about their new API - Google Charts API - and I had to give it a test drive. Just like so many of their other API offerings, this one is easy to use, well documented, and offers professional results with almost unlimited possibilities. This API allows you to easily embed charts in your web page through a simple http request (a png image is returned). They allow for quite a bit of customization and provide for numerous different charts (line chart, scatter plot, bar chart, Venn diagram, and pie charts). Definitely lives up to the Googlicious experience.

For example, here’s how I spent my day:

Google, I hate myself for lovin’ you.

In case you have nothing else to do tomorrow, Cal Evans and Zend’s DevZone will be hosting a live podcast with some of the founding members of PHPWomen.org. I’ll be there, along with Lig Turmelle, Elizabeth Marie Smith, and Sara Golemon. We’re taking live questions via phone or chat so it should be a hoot. And yes, we are screening the calls for all you crazies out there. But if you’re wondering about something, or you just want to call up and say hello, the instructions for phoning in or joining us via chat can be found in Cal’s post.

Date: December 4, 2007
Time: 7:00 PM (EST), 6:00 PM (CST)

Come hear me make a complete idiot out of myself

Chris Shiflett has put together a PHP Advent Calendar - basically 24 days of helpful PHP tips and tricks (similar to the Perl Advent calendar if you’re familiar with that). He was kind enough to include me in this fun project, and my “tip” is today. Mine was entitled “Writing Code is Like Doing the Dishes (or 5 Reasons Why Documenting Your Code Makes You a Better Coder)”.

You can also read Sean Coates’ tip for overriding the sending of mail and logging it instead - great for testing, especially if you’re going to be sending out your mail to a large group. Sean’s can be read here.

I recommend keeping an eye on Chris’ blog for the next few weeks, to see what other interesting things crop up.

If you weren’t able to attend ZendCon this year, you missed out on a fun activity put together by the one and only Cal Evans of DevZone - the PHP Trading Cards. The goal was for attendees to collect as many as they could to win a free conference pass back (congrats, Spoon!). At any rate, Cal has released the cards on Flickr, and here’s mine:

In case you’re interested, here are the slides from my recent talk at ZendCon. My presentation was on E-Commerce and how PHP can be used in many other ways besides just a simple shopping cart. We use PHP in virtually every facet of our company - we really are powered by PHP. I’ve not done public speaking to a larger group in a while, (most of my public speaking experience is through teaching e-commerce) but I fared better than I thought. I usually end up completely humiliating myself in some form or another (ask me sometime about the speech I gave to my high school senior class.)

At any rate, I did get some positive feedback from some attendees - several of which were thankful that someone had touched on PHP in small business use. Again, I want to stress to all conference organizers that not everyone can practically use methodologies that are geared toward enterprise, and smaller, simpler solutions for the smaller dev shops still do have a place at these things. Hell, maybe I’ll organize a new PHP conference (as if there aren’t enough already) that’s geared toward small business and just leave big business out of it altogether .

Overall, it was a great experience as conferences always are, and even though I didn’t get to attend a lot of presentations (due to work and some other external factors) I did pick up a few tidbits here and there. Besides the PHP knowledge you can obtain, another benefit to conferences like these are the social connections you carry home with you. You can connect through IRC, mailing lists, forums, and other ways… but when it comes right down to it, there is no substitute for real face-to-face human interaction. And if it occurs while enjoying an adult beverage or two, and maybe some crazy karate guys chopping up skulls, then all the better. I felt very fortunate to be able to meet several people in person that I had only previously known by name, and to meet some new people as well. Just like college, it’s perhaps not only about learning information but also going through the experience that makes you better off on the other side.

I also want to personally thank Cal Evans and Zend for allowing phpwomen.org the opportunity to promote our cause - it was wonderful to see so much support from men and women attendees alike. I especially liked seeing our signature purple t-shirts everywhere, and I hope everyone wearing one comes to visit our site and forums. A lot of guys brought shirts back to the PHP women working in their department - bonus points for all of you, and we appreciate your help spreading the word.

I don’t know if my liver can handle it, but I do look forward to going to next year’s conference. Hope to see you there!

I’ve been intrigued by Ruby and Rails for a while now but I’ve only really tested the waters out of curiosity. If time was of no consequence, I’d probably have gotten a lot further in my Programming Ruby book, but dabbling with Rails and Ruby both are as far as I got. I was tempted by the quick deployment of rails, but also uncomfortable with the so-called Golden Path.

I also lurk on an agile programming mailing list (which are mostly made of RoR guys). One of them recently sent around this article by Derek Sivers on O’Reilly Net: 7 Reasons I Switched Back to PHP After 2 Years on Rails. Of course my opinion on this is biased, but I think he makes a few interesting points. The first of which is basically that PHP can do anything you want it to do. This is my favorite reason for using PHP - it thrills me that I can basically just make it do what I want it to do. And if I can’t get something to work right, nine times out of ten, it’s my own fault for not using the language properly or my own faulty logic- not something I can blame PHP for. PHP really does free your mind to create whatever your imagination can dream up.

The second point I wanted to highlight was regarding integration. This is a huge benefit that I use on a daily basis. There are so many third party apps, libraries and code snippets that can easily be integrated to your current PHP systems - it really can make things seamless. I love this - everything just plays nice together. (Well, most times anyway).

It’s an interesting opinion article, so if you haven’t seen it and you want to annoy your RoR pals, send them the link: http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html

A bit belated, but my podcast for Cal made it to the PHP Abstract series of podcasts posted on Zend’s DevZone. In this episode, I’m talking about telecommuting and some of the things I’ve found over the years to be potential gotchas. If you’ve got an extra 5 minutes give it a listen and let me know what you think. And don’t worry, you won’t hurt my feelings

If anybody’s in the market for a new webhost (especially one that knows their PHP), let me make a suggestion: Try nexcess.net. After increasing difficulties with our previous company, I knew I had to make a change. Recurring downtime, not so helpful support, PCI compliance issues, an eggdrop attack which we’re still recovering from, inconsistent backups and several other issues which I won’t go in to, were all leading me to the point of breaking free- even perhaps going to a dedicated server (of which I have absolutely no time nor desire to manage).

So what was holding me back? For one, we’d been with the old company since 2003-2004. Our set up was comfortable in a familiar sense. The cost couldn’t be beat, and the thought of switching all those hosting accounts over quite frankly gave me a headache. As I perused my php|architect magazine a few weeks ago, I noticed (as I had many times before) the Nexcess.net ad prominently on the back cover. The thing that really caught my eye was the “we’ll transfer all your accounts for you, for free” statement which happened to strike a cord in me. Other webhosts may do this too, I don’t know, but it really stood out to me like a lighthouse in my stormy webhost relationship.

I sent them a few questions and much to my surprise, got a timely and helpful response to each of my concerns… and not by a sales guy, but by an actual support guy. The price was right, the staff was courteous and friendly, and sure enough - they did all my dirty work for me, transferring everything over without a hitch. The only thing I did was change the DNS servers for all my accounts, and they would have done that too if I’d asked.

Since then, any issue that has come up has been answered (usually within minutes) regardless of the time of day or night. In fact, it’s now roughly 11:00 pm on a Saturday night, and I’ve just finished an email exchange about one of my cron jobs (thanks Greg!).

I really can’t say enough good things about these guys and the fact that they are ingrained in the PHP community gives them extra bonus points from me. Anybody who is currently unhappy with their host, reselling plan, VPS, or dedicated server should really take a look at what they have to offer.

It’s been a while since I’ve written for my friends at International PHP Magazine, but I was happy to contribute to their recently released June edition. I did an interview with the new PEAR Group on the future of PEAR. I’m glad to see such enthusiasm and collaboration among the newly elected group; I think we’ll all benefit from some of the changes they’ll be making (and have already started to make). A big personal thanks goes out to each member of the group for their feedback.

To read the full article you can purchase a single copy of the magazine - or you can peruse the Table of Contents before you buy.

ZendCon recently announced their speakers lineup, and imagine my surprise to see that my talk had been accepted. I’ll be speaking on PHP & E-commerce and some of the things PHP can easily do besides allowing you to set up “just a shopping cart.” Given the number of talks on the Zend Framework, I’m hoping my e-commerce talk won’t be too out of place– it’s more for the Business Case track anyway. It won’t be too code-intensive, but I hope to make it entertaining and educational at the same time. I’m also proud to give more representation to the little guys - conferences tend to focus more on enterprise, and I’m glad I can show what a profound impact PHP can have on the bottom-line.

Now, if I can just get the internet retailing industry to pay attention to open source (and PHP) then I’ll truly be a happy camper.

I finally made it back Thursday night from this year’s php|tek conference. Despite the flaky internet connections (which is problematic at a lot of hotels and something over which you have no control) I think Marco and his team did a fabulous job, especially considering that there are companies whose job it is to only plan and run conferences… there weren’t any major issues or problems, and everything went off without a hitch (and with class I might add). Job well done, especially for a bunch of PHPheads

I don’t get to attend too many of these, but I was especially pleased to see a relatively high percentage of women there (and by high I mean 10% or so). And of course it was great meeting them and some of the other attendees. I really enjoy seeing how people are using PHP and hearing their stories. I only wish I’d had more time to mingle around and chat.

It was also great to meet people that I had chatted with over email or IRC and to put faces with names. It is funny to me when I meet people whose blog I regularly read - I feel like I know them, but of course they have no idea who I am, so it makes me out to be somewhat of a stalker. Sorry about that, Derick and Lukas.

The talks were very interesting, and as usual I found myself conflicted with wanting to go to more than one talk being held at the same time. What’s an attendee to do? As expected, there were several based on security, and I found the rest of the topics to be timely, helpful and diverse. I was able to glean good information from every one I attended. These speakers know what they’re doing and they do it well.

Marco and his team did a great job including innovative and interactive activities, like the php|tek live site with a photo stream, links to all the slides from the speakers, the conference program, and all kinds of other pertinent info for the attendees. We also got some great schwag and I loved the PHP Trivia contest, which challenged randomly chosen members of the studio audience to a battle of PHP wits. I know they’ve done the trivia contest in the past, but they shook it up a bit this time which was nice.

A couple of interesting observations I made while I was there:

• The diverse level of experience of the attendees. There were quite a few who had just started learning PHP, and there were many others who had been doing PHP for years. I think that it would be nice to see some talks or even a full track just for beginners – I wondered if some of the talks might have been a little robust for them. The tutorials are obviously helpful, but I wonder if that same line of thinking should be extended throughout a conference?
• I was surprised at the number of people who had not heard of the Month of PHP Bugs. I think it was Ilia who asked it in his Securing PHP Applications talk, and only about 10-15 people raised their hands. Call me naive, but I thought that was some pretty big news in the PHP world, and I was shocked that not more people had heard of it. I’ve been thinking for a while that there might be a huge chasm between the everyday PHP developer and PHP goings-on in general, and I think this backs up my theory. I realize not everybody has time to read all the blogs in the PHP blogosphere, but I would have thought something like the MOPB would have been something that was familiar to everyone, especially given all the press it received. As an aside, when I mentioned to my local users group that I was going to be here, there were several members who had not heard of php|tek and weren’t familiar with the php|architect magazine… further backing up my theory. More about this later.
• I know that PHP in enterprise is a common theme with many talks, and that many attendees come from big corporations, but I met numerous developers that were either the only one at their company, or one of a handful of PHPers. I hope these individual entities don’t get lost in the enterprise shuffle
• I heard some very lively (and yet still diplomatic) discussions/disagreements between members of PHP internals, which was educational to say the least, but it also got me thinking. What if the internals had their own conference once a year, just to meet face to face and rationally discuss some of the issues on the table? Surely it’s easier to remove oneself from political BS over a beer, and face to face. You know, something like this, but maybe with a broader inclusion of internals and more on a regular basis? Ah well, what do I know, I’m just a kibitzer.

So anyway, mad props to the php|a guys for a great conference. All your hard work really paid off. And for those who want the full photo spread, you can find it at Flickr.

It’s official - I’m now acting as the News Editor for php|architect and I’m very excited to be working with Marco and his crew on another project. As I said on Paul and Sean’s podcast, my goal is not to compete with Cal Evans or enygma’s phpdeveloper.org, but to act as just another resource for PHP developers to keep on top of things. The more information available to the PHP community, the better. (I think Chris and Cal do a superior job by the way). So anyway, if you have any newsworthy items, let me know by email at elizabeth..at..naramore..dot..net.

Also thanks to Paul for letting me plug PHP Women and helping to support our cause.

Not only is “Google” just a fun word to say, there are so many fun toys to play with over there, sometimes I just can’t help myself. I already use Gmail, Google Talk, Alerts, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets, Adwords & Adsense, Google Earth, Google Reader, Google Notebook, and of course Google Maps. A handy presentation on the Google Maps API by a fellow OINK-PUG member (thanks Frank Glandorf) got me thinking about what could be done with the API, especially now with geocoding readily available. And even though it is a weekend and I have about a million other things to do, I just couldn’t help myself.

So I poked and prodded around the Google Maps API for a few hours, deciding that I would write a little app for my fugitive-catching husband. Playing with the maps was fun, but what I really was interested in was the geocoding. I was able to write a handy little app that would help catch his parole absconders by providing more information than he had from his reports. (I hesitate to go into this in too great of detail because of the nature of his job… not that his “clients” know or care what Google API means, but with my luck…)

At any rate, after banging my head on the wall while messing around with xml/kml/json and the xAL formatting of the returned info, I stumbled across this easy-peasy tutorial written by Jason Gilmore. I have this nasty habit of making things harder than they need to be - big thank you to Jason for acting as a voice of reason in all my javascript madness.

After actually completing the app for my husband, I felt empowered to tackle a problem we’ve had at the giftsforengineers.com store for a while. In January of 2006, the state of Ohio, in its infinite wisdom, decided to completely screw over all the online merchants operating from within the state. They decreed that all Ohio businesses should now collect sales tax based on the county where the goods or services were being delivered instead of based on the physical location of the business. In other words, before this new law, if I had a business located in Hamilton County, Ohio, I charged the same sales tax to everyone - whatever the Hamilton County tax rate was at the time of the sale. After this new law came into effect, I had to charge sales tax for whatever county my customer was located in. Not only do I now have to keep track of all 88 Ohio counties and their ever changing tax rates, I now have to figure out what county the customer is located in. Unfortunately, in the state of Ohio, one cannot go by zip codes alone, as zip codes span more than county. Attempts to integrate the Ohio Department of Taxation address/county database with our current system proved to be a monumental task, so we resorted to simply asking the customer to provide us with their county name and doing a quick lookup from that.

The problem comes in however, when a customer is buying a gift for another person, and having it delivered straight to the recipient. Many times they don’t know the recipient’s county, and thus the incorrect sales tax could be charged. Obviously our current system was not foolproof. Now, thanks to Google’s super-easy geocoding, I solved this problem with about 10 lines of code. My code now automatically looks up the county and the charges the applicable tax based on the customer’s delivery address.

I also took some time to play with the Google Custom Search Engine. I created a search engine for PHP Articles and Tutorials, but I only included the top 20 PHP resources for these. (Top 20 in my humble opinion, anyway). So now if I’m looking to increase my knowledge on a particular topic, but I don’t necessarily want to see millions of threads about it in PHP forums or anywhere else, I can do a quick search of just the sites I want. Although I’ll be tweaking this in the next few days, anybody’s welcome to use Elizabeth’s PHP Article Search. (Feel free to make fun of the awesome undesign of the site, you won’t hurt my feelings.)

[cross-posted on PHPThrowdown.com]

Wow, what can I say but w00t! The throwdown was a tremendous success and went off without any major problems. We’re still compiling all the final projects and I’ll be reporting some statistics about those (as in who was using what and how many competitors we had per category). I am excited to see what all has come of it.

I immensely enjoyed reading the live bloggers’ posts as they made their way through the 24 hours. All seemed to enjoy the experience in a masochistic sort of way, but that’s what it’s ultimately all been about. Coding just for the fun of it for as long as you possibly can. I wish we’d seen more live blogs from the competitors only because they were so fascinating and fun to read.

We’ll be sending around a feedback survey to the participants so we can make next year’s Throwdown even better. Once we get things sorted out, we’ll put together a timeline for when the winners will be announced. So bear with us as we work all this out.

I really have to acknowledge the efforts of Bill Barnett, my server admin, who singlehandedly managed to stay awake for the entire duration of all four Phases of the competition. He quickly and expertly addressed any concerns participants had and I am thoroughly impressed at his dedication to making this event such a success (especially since he ain’t getting paid a dime to do this ). Huge thanks go out to him, and next year we may even get him some help. Great job, Bill!

That’s it from our end for now. Stay tuned.

Sitting here at my keyboard (and being generally available during the course of the PHPThrowdown) I decided I’d be somewhat productive. I decided to finally take 2 years of log files and crank them through a local copy of AWStats which would let me overcome some of our server copy’s config limitations (such as not tracking dynamic URLs). My biggest obstacle was my own stupidity and distinguishing between the 3 different versions of Apache I had running on my machine (I’m sure I had a good reason for doing that, although I have no idea what that reason might be). It usually helps if you configure the copy of Apache that you’re actually looking at.

But after that, getting Apache, Perl and AWStats to all play together wasn’t so bad - just took some tweaking. I think AWStats is still my favorite log file analyzer.

[cross-posted on PHPThrowdown.com]

The Throwdown has officially begun! If you’re a competitor, and you’ll be live blogging - let the community know by posting your link in the comments of this post at the PHPThrowdown site.

Good luck to all those competing - we can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with.

[cross-posted on phpthrowdown.com]

Registration is now open for the PHP Throwdown! A huge thanks to Ken Macke and Bill Barnett for helping with this. To sign up, go to our Sign Up! Page and get yourself registered.

Blogture.com has also offered to provide any competing individual or team a blog for live blogging throughout the competition. Details on this will be provided in your registration confirmation email.

And of course, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me at info _at_ phpthrowdown.com.

Good luck!

(Cross posted on PHPThrowdown.com)

Many people probably think the PHP Throwdown has stalled, but it’s quite the contrary actually. We’ve been mulling over many things and have come to some conclusions. So if you’re interested, read on!

Judges. The judges for the competition have been decided, and you can see the full list on the Judges page. Don’t try bribing them; trust me, I’ve tried and it doesn’t work.

Categories. We’ve been lining up some pretty nice prizes and as such, we realize that some of you lesser beings may be tempted to go to the dark side and cheat your way to the top. Therefore, although we may or may not have decided on the final categories, we may or may not reveal that we may or may not be revealing them a few days before the contest. Any information you may or may not have regarding the categories can be officially disregarded from this point on.

Prizes. As I said, we’ve got some terrific prizes in the works, and I’ll be announcing them in a few weeks, so stay tuned.

Sponsors. A tremendously huge shout-out to JupiterHosting who has graciously allowed us the use of server space. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, contact Elizabeth Naramore at info_at_phpthrowdown.com.

Registration. We’re going to be opening up registration after the first of the year, quite simply because I’m swamped at the moment. Stay tuned on this as well.

Da Rules. We’ve altered the rules a bit, so take a look. Yes, we actually have the power to do that… it’s good to be the king.

All that being said, we’re moving full steam ahead with the competition, so bear with us as we iron out some of the issues that stand before us. May the best coder win!

The PHP Throwdown gauntlet has been thrown down!

What: 24-hour coding competition to see who can code the best PHP app
When: January 27, 2007
Who: You! You may enter individually or as a team, so if you think you’ve got what it takes then read more.

We’re in the planning stages of the competition, so if you’re interested in being involved as a volunteer, drop me a note. We’re also looking for some interesting ideas for our sample apps so if you have one of those, then visit the site and leave a comment or drop me a note.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what some of you talented developers can crank out in 24 hours. Stay tuned for more information!

A quick note to say that International PHP Magazine’s October edition has been released. In this edition, my article is entitled Are You Making a Profit in Your Freelance Business?. Quick blurb from the intro:

As coders, it’s hard for us to figure out how much to charge for a project, and even harder to perform the follow-up administrative tasks like sending and checking up on unpaid invoices. As a freelancer, however, you are responsible for all aspects of managing your business, and if you’re not making enough money to support yourself and your family (or at least come out ahead on the projects you’re doing on the side) then you’d be better off sitting on the couch eating potato chips and watching Oprah. The article will help you manage those pesky finances and make sure you’re not pricing yourself out of a job.

Enjoy!

It’s been a little over a week now since Lig and I originally sent out our request for the women of the PHP world to unite. In that week, we’ve had many people step up to donate their time and server space. Cal Evans was gracious enough to donate space, Laura Thomson generously donated a mailing list, and Lig installed a forum (which has been so active I can barely keep up!) We also have an IRC channel (#phpwomen on Freenode) in case you have a moment to chat. We’re currently in the process of choosing a CMS to act as our skeleton, so keep an eye out for that too.

We have had a terrific response, not only from the women, but also from the men, which is what I think is especially unique and wonderful about the PHP community. Even though it can be very intimidating to be one of a handful of females in a room of 200+ men, any insecurity I’ve felt has been self-imposed and certainly not by exclusion from anyone. I’ve been in other groups where the disdain was almost palpable, and I’ve personally not seen that at all in the PHP Community (either virtually on things like forums or IRC or in person at meetings and such). I do want to see women better represented and more visible, but I also appreciate the efforts made by those in the community to make us feel equal and included.

So in short, thank you, PHP community, and thanks to the awesome PHP women who make up a part of it.

Ligaya Turmelle and I were having a bit of a chat in the PHP Community IRC channel (#phpc) about women in the PHP world (or the lack thereof). We think it would be a great idea to start a women’s group for PHP programmers and we want to know who’s with us. We’ve all noticed the lack of females at conferences, user groups, and in print - let’s get together and change those numbers, shall we? So let us know if you’re in (you can contact me at elizabeth _at_ naramore _dot_ net or post a comment at Lig’s blog.)

Short version: it rocked!

See the photos.

Long version:
3+ days of collaboration, exchanging information, hiking, building campfires, and basically getting silly is now on my “highly recommended things to do before you die” list. Not only does a gathering like this provide you with an outlet to expand and share your knowledge on a professional level, it gives you an opportunity to relax with like-minded people and just plain have a good time. We had 12 total attendees, which made it nice to get together as a large group, but also allowed those who wanted to venture off in smaller groups to do so. There were ample opportunities to talk about technology and other subjects, and the conversations were always lively. I enjoyed the “take it as it goes” attitude we adopted, and I think it really fostered the development of professional relationships. The Wi-Fi and cell phone service was a little flaky, but I think we were all able to go with the flow, and we didn’t let it get in the way of our un-conference.

I really enjoyed Ben and Chris’s presentations on REST and regex, and they did a great job of making them easy to understand and professional. Thanks for all your hard work, guys!

I also greatly enjoyed the informal discussions that came up. Some of the topics we discussed included
* trying to hire good developers & the Zend certification’s role in that
* managing client expectations through agile development
* how books introduce people to PHP and how beginners may learn
pitfalls from the very beginning
* the Zend Framework and the front controllers
* simplepie.org’s RSS aggregator
* Ajax and accessibility issues
* JSON and JPSPAN
* why and how we all got into PHP
* the publishing industry
* s5
* astronomy and other related topics
* and numerous others

There were also others on our list that we didn’t get to talk about as a group, but perhaps we’ll continue those through our phpappalachia mailing list.

The weather was basically cooperative (except for the hailstorm we got caught in while hiking up to Clingman’s Dome on Day #2!) Thankfully Day #3 redeemed itself and we were able to make a return trip. We saw some amazing views although I was terrified to climb to the top of the observation tower, so I hung back near the bottom.

All in all I greatly enjoyed the mix of professional discussions with the informal attitude we adopted, and I am happy to have fostered some great PHP friendships. Heck, I even got to try some grits which I’d never had. I think the photos really captured the spirit of the conference.

I’m really looking forward to a bigger and better PHP Appalachia next year!

For anyone curious about what our plans are for the PHP Appalachia conference, we’ve posted our schedule on the site. Our plan is to keep things flexible, but with a pinch of structure, and a couple of formal presentations thrown in for good measure. If you’re going to be attending and you have any questions, don’t hesitate to send an email to the mailing list, or to me or Ben.

It’s getting closer - only 7 more days until PHP Appalachia. Looks like the weather will be cooperative, at least as far as they can predict today. I’m dusting off my camping gear and getting ready to head out.

I wanted to give a quick acknowledgement to our sponsors for the event, as posted by Ben on our PHP Appalachia site. We have so many sponsors, and so many door prizes to give away, a good time will definitely be had by all. Their donations are really helping our grass roots gathering come together, and we all greatly appreciate their efforts. I also want to give a quick thanks to Cal Evans who also personally donated numerous t-shirts and goodies as well.

Our rough schedule is in the final stages of completion, and besides alotting time for our presentations and lively campfire discussions, we’re also going to be setting aside time for lightning talks (in true OSCON fashion) so the attendees can take the floor for 5-10 minutes and speak about whatever’s on their mind. We’ve also of course included time for hiking, sightseeing, and simply hanging out around the campsite. I’ll be posting the schedule to the PHP Appalachia site once everything is finalized… or as finalized as we’re getting at this gathering.

Although it’s only a week away, you can still register for the event. Registration is only $15, and all attendees get a free t-shirt and free Wi-Fi while they’re at the conference. The more the merrier we say - so come join us! For more info, visit our site.

We now have an IRC channel for the PHP Appalachia conference - Freenode - #phpappalachia. Come join us!

It’s officially official. Ben, Aaron, Chris & I had shared some IRC discussions about how great it would be to just go camping and talk about PHP and PHP-related stuff (and perhaps share an adult beverage or two over a campfire.) Thus, PHP Appalachia was born!

What:
PHP Appalachia is an informal gathering of PHP enthusiasts who just want an excuse to get together and enjoy exchanging information in a relaxed, beautiful setting. There is no set agenda, no formal speakers. Just 3 days of camping and sharing PHP ideas and experiences with people just like you.

When:
September 27-29, 2006

Where:
This gathering will be held at the Cherokee/Great Smokies KOA in Cherokee, NC.

The Cherokee / Great Smokies KOA is bordered on one side by the serene Raven Fork River and on the other side by three tribal trout ponds. It lies just across the road from Great Smoky Mountains National Park and one mile from the Blue Ridge Parkway. From almost anywhere on KOA’s grounds, take in 360-degree mountain views. Enjoy the shuttle to area attractions, indoor pool and hot tub, fitness center, island pet walk, whitewater rafting, horseback riding and gem mining excursions, among other things. Wireless Internet is available at the campground.

Who:

Anyone with an interest in PHP and PHP related technologies is welcome to attend. Even if “roughing it” is not your thing, you’re welcome to come along as there are numerous area hotels available.

How Much:
Registration is only $15, and each attendee will receive a free PHP Appalachia t-shirt. Accomodations are very affordable, and meals are available for about $25/day.

Anyone in the Cincinnati area that wants a ride down, I’ll be leaving on September 26 and coming back the 30th. I have room for 6 so let me know if you want a ride.

Make sure to check out the PHP Appalachia Website for all the gory details- and come and join us, it’ll be loads of fun!

So it was my task to send out our email newsletter for giftsforengineers.com - we had a bunch of things to let our customers know about (50 new items, upcoming sales, gift certificates, that sort of thing). Usually I shy away from flashy emails as many of our subscribers opt for the “text-only” version.

So basically this was a rich-text format, no biggie. This time when the emails went out, some people got 5 copies of the email and some didn’t get it at all. (Nice and professional, huh?). I’m still trying to discern what might have caused this, and I’m wondering if it has something to do with HTML vs. text-only versions when the customer subscribed. We’ve sent these out in the past without incident but this time was squirrely for some reason. If you have any ideas, let me know!

The latest edition of International PHP Magazine has been released. This time I showcased this extremely cool site called “Netdisaster.com” - this guy does some hilarious things with websites, all with PHP. It’s pretty amazing. Go ruin some competitors’ sites and have fun.

International PHP Magazine’s latest edition has been released, and can be found here. In this edition I wrote about PHP’s use in Beeradvocate.com and the International Federation of Competitive Eating websites. PHP, Beer, and Food. My 3 favorite things… doesn’t get much better than that.

My thanks go out to Todd Alstrom and Matt Rowe, two talented developers who were great about providing me the information I needed to write the article. Thanks guys!

The latest edition of International PHP Magazine is out, with the next in my PHP From the Shop Floor series. This time I focused on a site called Collaborcare, who aims to connect people in need with people who care, all while using PHP to drive the site. It’s an interesting site and a great idea.

My good buddies at International PHP Magazine have completed quite an overhaul of their website and magazine. Their website has completely been redone, with a new logo, color scheme and all… and their magazine is switching to a “download only” format. I think that was a great decision, as I’m sure the cost of printing and postage was quite prohibitive for all parties involved. Now they can deploy editions much faster (they’re going to a monthly format) and reduce delivery time by about 100%. They can also reach hard to get to places and are no longer limited by traditional means.

Kudos to Indu and her team!