I just saw someone tweet that they’d received something in the post, and linked to a URL shortener service.  It redirected to Amazon.  Now I realize that Twitter is a pretty new service, but with mobile rising, I think we’ll see a need for short URLs more and more.  Couple that with the slightly extra [...]

Posted in Ecommerce, Web 9 Comments »

I had the pleasure of talking with Randal Schwartz about his latest passion - Seaside - over on WebDevRadio.com.  Check it out.
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Posted in Software, Web No Comments »

I found a review of my brother’s Magento book earlier today.  Starting off with “However, I’m not really the type of person to give accolades unless something is absolutely stellar. As such, this post will primarily be about the shortcomings of the book” I wasn’t particularly surprised that there was more of a focus on [...]

Posted in Book, Ecommerce, Software, Web 14 Comments »

I relaunched the PHP Job Hunter Handbook blog.  After a job move last summer, and the book getting shifted from self-publish to external publisher, I unfortunately let the blog grow stale.  I’ve relaunched it today with an explanation about what happened, and some more detail about the progress of the book over the last year.
Also, [...]

Posted in Blogging, Book, Software, Web No Comments »

ReadWriteWeb had a thought-provoking article up today about what the future IT worker would look like.  More specifically, what sorts of skills this person would need to have to be successful.  Not surprisingly, the recommendation was, in a nutshell, the ability to communicate with other members of the business on their terms.  I don’t think [...]

Posted in Business, Society, Software, Web No Comments »

I’ve recently been working on a project trying to take an existing customized wordpress site and create automated integration tests around parts of it.  I’m using phpUnderControl, phpUnit, Selenium RC, Firefox, Xvfb (virtaul frame buffer) and … well, I think that’s it.
So, phpUC is configured to do a checkout from svn on a commit, then [...]

Posted in PHP, Software, Web 5 Comments »

I started my “PHP Job Hunter’s Handbook” many moons ago, and had interest from PHP Architect last summer/fall about publishing it.  After some false starts in finishing it, we wrapped it up several weeks ago, and happily it’s ‘out there’.  Whew!
The perfectionist in me was somewhat reluctant about publishing it at first, but after several [...]

Posted in Book, PHP, Web, Writing 4 Comments »

I’ve been using PHP since early 1996, back in the PHP/FI days.  I’ve used it steadily over the years, sometimes full time and sometimes part time, but that’s been pretty much a primary language for me for 12 years now.  During that time I’ve seen a lot of language changes, some for better and some [...]

Posted in Grails, Groovy, Java, PHP, Rails, Ruby, Web 18 Comments »

Manuel Lemos did an interview with Maurício Garcia on the topic of PHP certification.  It’s good to see this sort of thing talked about more, and to get an ‘international’ point of view.  My view on the topic is somewhat necessarily limited by my geography and experiences, but seem to mirror Mauricio’s fairly closely.
My PHP [...]

Posted in Book, PHP, Software, Web 12 Comments »

Just a quick note on what I’ve been working on with GrailsKit.  I’m currently putting together a “user profile” page, which allows a user to edit their own profile.  Nothing too fancy, but I’m learning as I go how best to do this in Grails.  Coupla new points learned doing this (it’s not done yet [...]

Posted in Grails, Groovy, Java, Web No Comments »