Alright, well – I’m going to give this a try and see how useful it really is. I figure that being able to express things here (without having to worry too much that people won’t think it’s news) will be a nice change. There’s been a lot going on in the PHP community – really the web as a whole – and having more of an open forum to express some ideas about it all will be a nice change of pace.

Posting the news on PHPDeveloper every day (well, okay, maybe not every day, but I try) is almost like having a second job. Thankfully, my current employer seems okay with the fact that I spend 30-45 minutes in the morning gathering and posting news. I finally wised up to the benefits of having an aggregator do a lot of the work for me (previously, I’d just be visiting each and every site), though there are still some sites that are stubborn about the whole “RSS revolution” that’s been going around. It’s all in how you think about it, really – whether you’re protective of the content on your site, or whether you want it to be out there in every way, shape, and form for your users. I love all of the new uses that have come around with RSS – everything from the podcasting that’s taken over to the simple ability to make a search results page something you can feed into an RSS aggregator and see when there are new results for that search. It’s customiztion on a whole new level.

And where does PHP fit into all of this? Well, now, more than ever, PHP is proving that it can scale and adapt to whatever the community throws at it. I even found a PEAR class today that takes an MP3 file and converts it into a viable torrent file – perfect for the podcasters out there that are looking for possible ways to reduce bandwidth issues. And with things like PEAR 1.4 on the way and the power behind PHP5, things are changing dramatically.

I’ve seen the other side of things as well with my operating of the AjaxDeveloper.org site – highlighting more of the client-side of things, talking about Ajax and related issues, but not necessarily sticking to them. I’m enjoying seeing the other side of things as well, and I get more of a feeling of being on the forefront of something that has the possibility to change the way the web works. Of course, it all needs something to provide the power on the backend, and that’s where PHP comes in. Flexible, simple to use, and running with years of development behind it, it really does seem to be the answer to a lot of developer’s prayers. One part PHP + one part Ajax = quite a few of the “Web 2.0” applications that I see coming out…

Anyway, I suppose that’s enough for this first entry – let me know what you think, both of this blog and of PHPDeveloper.org (and AjaxDeveloper.org if you’ve been there too).