It’s funny – I only realized a few days ago that the 10k post was coming up. You get so used to just wring the posts day after day that you don’t even really notice the numbers. Each thousand along the way has definitely been a milestone, but reaching ten thousand posts to PHPDeveloper.org really feels like an accomplishment.

I started the site while I was back in college. A friend of mine at the time (who I now work with once again, woo!) introduced a young Perl programmer to the wild world of web programming. When I headed out to college I had a basic idea of how the web worked and what it was. I knew there was value in it and not just in the business sense. There was this feeling that I could put my fingers to the keys and make things – things other people could look at and enjoy. When I learned about PHP, my interest grew and I read everything I could and looked at every site even remotely related to PHP. The more I really got into it, the more I wanted to share the things I was finding with the whole web (or at least the part that would want to read it). So, in one late Texas summer, the phpdeveloper.org domain name was bought and I set up shop on a little 486 there on the school’s network….it pays to be friends with the network admins.

Back then I would only post once a day – it’d gather some of the things that I thought were useful and write a summary, mashing them all together. I worked on the site (then in PHP3) and used it as a learning experience to grow in the language. Terms like “CMS” and “abstraction” started to come into the picture and soon PHP4 burst onto the scene in a big way. The site got its first major rewrite then, adapting to this strange and new object oriented setup the language now offered. I created my own little set of libraries to use for the site and whatever other projects that bled over on the sites. The number of hits that the site was getting was growing and the little 486 had to be retired for a dual Celeron 266 machine in my apartment. It kept the room hot but it served up the pages well.

Fast forward to just a few years ago and you’ll find PHPDeveloper.org sitting on a dedicated server, graduating up to the “big boy” world. The site’s been through two more major rewrites (one with the Zend Framework and the other recently with Solar) and have moved hosts once again to where it lives now (Slicehost).

I’ve had tons of help from others in the PHP community out there over the years – people like Davey, Eric and Ben that have posted for me what I wasn’t even remotely close to an internet connection. There have also been lots of supporting players over the years and, more recently, people from the community offering suggestions and sending in news submissions and leads to follow.

PHPDeveloper.org has always been about sharing the best and latest from all around the web to the PHP developers out there and I have no plan of stopping any time soon. As long as the PHP community thrives (and lets face it, it’s not going anywhere) the site will be right there along with it with plenty of news, views and community thoughts as they happen.

Thanks to all for the support to make it to 10k – here’s to hoping for 10k more!