It’s March 15th and you know what that means….only a month left for the procrastinators to do their taxes in the US. Well, actually, that’s not what I’m really talking about here. Last year a whole host of people write up posts titled “Ideas of March” and this year’s no different. Several members of the PHP community are jumping in with there thoughts on blogging – here’s some of mine.

Blogging is great, don’t get me wrong…I love it when I can Google for something and find that someone, somewhere has done exactly what I need. This historical record of shared knowledge is one of the things that makes the web great. Of course, it can also sometimes do more harm than good. “But I thought you were going to write about how blogging is a good thing,” you ask. Well, I believe it inherently is, but with a few caveats:

• Blogs are only as good as their authors:
  Not everyone out there is a clear, excellent writer (I know I’m not) and, as a result, sometimes the message of a post can get lost in poor wording. What’s a solution to this? Blog more often! That’s right, it’s just like anything else – the more you do something, the better at it you get. You start getting into a certain frame of mind when you’re fingers to the keys and you learn little “mind tricks” (no Jedi here) on how to best get your message across. You don’t have to be an amazing writer to be a clear one.

• Dates, Versions & Code:
  This one’s a tough one, especially for us tech bloggers. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve found what I thought I needed in my Google results only to go over to a post and discover that I have no idea when it was written. The URL gives no clue and there’s not a date to be found. This drives me nuts and if your blog dosen’t have dates on the post, go change that. Right now. I’ll wait here.

  Additionally, something that can make for a lot less frustration for people coming to your posts later are two things – somehow tagging or mentioning what version of a language the post relates to (“this post was written against PHP 5.2.5”) and trying to keep the code up to date. Yes, I know this second request requires a bit more commitment on your part, but people would sing your praises if you took the time to do it. Even if it’s just an update to a post that say, “I found a better way to do this…” in a more recent version of the language/tool.

• More than just a “brain dump”:
  I’ve seen several people use their blogs as a sort of “brain dump” – a place for them to post things that they just want to remember later on. This is all well and good, but don’t forget that blogs aren’t just about code snippets and tutorials. Sometimes you need to share a bit about you and what you’re passionate about too. Take some time to sit and reflect on what you do on a daily basis and think about how knowing that process could help others. I’d encourage you to write not only code-related posts, but also keep the rest of the world up to date on the interesting things you’re doing. Nothing builds communities like people sharing more than just code.

Finally, I’d like to end this post jammed full of suggestions with one final challenge – get out there and share. My recommendations aside, if all you do is write up one or two posts this month (and keep going) with a few paragraphs each, I think the web would be a better place. Sharing knowledge is what it’s all about and if you discover something, no matter how small, you could be sharing exactly what someone needs. Remember, just because you think it’s simple, doesn’t mean someone new to the tech does….get out there and share!

With a nod to this post from Cal Evans, I’m presenting my own “Top Three” posts from 2011, in order of descending popularity:

• I don’t understand the 9-to-5:
  This one is easily the tops of the popularity list…thanks to another PHP community member, this one made the front page of Hacker News for a little while and received almost five thousand hits in a day. My poor little slice didn’t know what hit it. I scrambled to put up something – anything – to be able to keep the site alive. Ultimately I ended up rendering a static version of the page to a buffer and manually refreshing it as new comments came in and were approved (39 of them!)

  The post was basically my views on developers who are genuinely interested in the work that they do and the ones that are more of the clock-in/clock-out coders that just “do the job”. There were tons of comments that both agreed and disagreed…and several that basically told me I needed to get a life or must not have kids (I have both, thankyouverymuch).

• Process Oriented versus Product Driven:
  This post was actually a quote from an interesting book on architecture and some of the things the author had learned during his time in school. This particular nugget of wisdom shows the difference between letting your work drive you and, instead, learning how to drive and shape what you do into something even better.

• How long is too long (for unit test names)?:
  This fun little post was a log of some tweets after I asked “how long is too long for a method name in a unit test”? It’s common to see things like “testValueIsValidInternalUrl” or “testUserCanExecuteTransaction” kinds of names so I wondered what other people’s experience with it was. One interesting point that came up was the use of “testdox” to translate out the name into something more readable.

These were just the most popular ones added in 2011…there’s a few others that were popular but were posted previously (like pdo+oracle and php+mq).

Hope your holidays were/are good and here’s to another great year of blogging and PHP community!

UPDATE: Besides Cal, other PHP community members are getting into the spirit – Matthew Turland, Joe Devon, Bradley Holt

I’ll admit it – I love to geek out as much as the next guy at the latest features of the PHP frameworks out there. I read the articles and tutorials every day about something awesome some framework can do (that maybe another can’t) and wish I had a place to apply it. I even find myself trying to think of new little projects so I can say I work with the latest tech. It’s an easy trap to fall into. I came to a realization earlier about frameworks, though – it’s less about the new hotness that the frameworks offer and more about what you do with them that matters.

Tech is great, don’t get me wrong – I love digging into some good code and getting my hands dirty. I love being close to the action and watching my work evolve with each reload. It’s easy to get lost in line after line of curly braces and colons and not look at the bigger picture, though. Remember as you’re doing your development – pick the right tool for the job and don’t be pulled in by the latest and greatest “just because”. Remember that the future of this language we love isn’t in the tech, but it’s in what you do with it.

If you haven’t gotten to check them out yet, be sure you listen to the webcasts from EngineYard about the future of PHP. So far they’ve covered a few of the more popular frameworks and where they’re headed, but I have it on good authority that upcoming episodes will be talking less about the “what powers it” and more about the “why it’s there” kind of topics.

Originally, I was going to present these thoughts at the PHP Community Conference (in a session titled “It’s not Just About the News”) but it didn’t work out for me to be there. I still wanted to share some of my thoughts and experience in running PHPDeveloper.org for the last 11 years.

In its very first form, PHPDeveloper.org was just a page of links. It was hosted on a local server I had at the college I attended and was aliased to the outside world under the hostname “bender.ods.org”. I started gathering links on that page to some of my favorite PHP resources of the time – things like PHPBuilder.com and, of course, the PHP.net manual. I was new to the language – this was back in 1999-2000 range – and was constantly devouring everything I could about it. Not many of the free hosting services supported PHP back then so running it on my own server was clearly the answer. I compiled my own installations from scratch complete with some of the earlier versions of Apache, PHP3 (fresh off of PHP/FI) and MySQL. All of my code was procedural and I had no clue about application design. All I knew was that I loved the language. I left my Perl books to gather dust and marched on to a bright PHP-based future.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure when I made the leap from a set of links to the sort of blog style PHPDev is in today. I was a huge fan of Slashdot back then (weren’t we all?) and I think I thought to myself one day, “I could totally do that”. So I hacked together a custom sort of content management system and started to work. Things weren’t as consistent then as they were now. Back then I might have posted once a week, two or three times if I was feeling ambitious. If you want a good laugh, go back and take a look at some of my earliest posts on the Internet Archive.

I was a big IRC user back then – still am on Freenode – and I spread the word about the site mostly through there. There was no such thing as Twitter and getting sites like Yahoo to notice you wasn’t as easy as it is now. I had one thing going for me though…back then there just wasn’t another PHP news site out there, at least not one that was consistently updated. I was determined that PHPDev would become one of the best resources out there for PHP-related news and community happenings that it could be.

Some folks have called me a human aggregator in the past, and I think that’s what really sets the site apart from some of the other PHP news/community sites out there. I’ve never, ever pulled in posts automatically from other sources. Yep, that’s right – I hand-write every post you read on the site. I spend about an hour or so each day trolling through my Google Reader feeds (I’m up to 434 of them currently) to find some of the most interesting content out there. I actually spend some time reading the posts and writing up a good summary of what it has to offer. Plus, I can do some fun things the other automatic readers can’t like:

• Pulling announcements from Twitter
• Listening to podcasts and summarizing their content
• Filtering out posts that are related to a product or general commentary
• Making community announcements about conferences
• Taking specific article submissions

One of the best things, though, is subscribing to things like DZone or PHPCamp and discovering new articles that aren’t even on other aggregator’s radar. I gather things from the four corners of the web and try to make the best sense I can out them to share with the world. In recent years, I’ve realized that the “stuff I find interesting” approach is good, but I had to widen the scope to make it really work. I now read through my feeds and think more “is there a group that would find this interesting” instead. As a result there’s been posts on things outside of PHP touching on software like Drupal/WordPress/Joomla as well as Open Source projects that might be related to PHP, but not always directly.

I’m sure you’re curious about the technology behind the site. Well, let me say off the bat, you’re probably going to be disappointed. Remember when I said I had a hacked together CMSish kind of thing to manage the content – it’s not much different these days. I started with it back in PHP3 and it was all procedural. It wasn’t pretty but I was proud of it and it worked. Then PHP4 came along and these magical things called objects and OOP came along with it. Of course, I just had to do a rewrite. PHPDev v2 was born. Things changed again when Zend announced that they were making a framework (framework? what’s a framework?) and released some of their earliest versions. So, being the curious developer I was, I did what any good developer would do – another rewrite (PHPDev v3). If you’re wondering, I think it was ZF 0.7 or 0.8 – not sure which. Keep in mind that most of these rewrites came with a design update, but they all took the same basic news site/blog format. Finally, and this is the current form, I wanted to learn something different so I branched out to the Solar framework in yet another rewrite (yep, PHPDev v4).

So, what does all of that mean? It shows that the tools don’t matter. I could probably rewrite the site a million different ways, but that’s not what it’s about. Most of my current posting is just done on a simple form with subject, content and date/time. I write them in the morning and queue them to go out during the day. Sure, there’s been a few hiccups now and then when the technology changed, but what matters to most of my visitors is the content.

I checked in my logs a little while back just to see how many people were hitting the feeds on my site and found an interesting statistic – there’s now more people following the @phpdeveloper account on Twitter than there are pulling the feeds. Now, that’s not taking into consideration any re-blogging folks do of my content (that’s a whole other topic), but it’s still interesting to me.

So, how far have things come since the site’s birth back in 2000? Well, without trying to sound too boastful about it, I think PHPDev has become one of the most respected PHP news sites out there and provides a valuable service to the community that can only come from a human behind the helm. As of my latest post, the database now hosts 16232 articles that chronicle the history of the years the PHP community has been through, both the good and the bad.

Of course, I couldn’t end this post without thanking each and every one of you out there – my readers have made the site what it is. I couldn’t have done it without you. Your contributions – either through blog posts or actual submissions – are the lifeblood of the site. I’ve stood on the shoulders of everyone in the community to reach this high, and I thank you for letting me come along.

This morning I and fellow DallasPHP-er Jake Smith officially launched the website for the local PHP conference we’ve been working on for the past few months – the Lone Star PHP Conference (happening in Dallas, Tx on June 11th).

It’s a one-day, two-track event that brings together some great speakers from around the Dallas area to talk on loads of different topics. Here’s a few of them from the list:

• Using PHP and MySQL to Build Applications with Windows Azure
• Disregard Inputs, Acquire Zend_Form
• Using Dependency Injection for Proper Unit Testing
• Drupal
• Unsung Heroes of PHP

Why another conference, you ask? Well, the PHP community here in Dallas is definitely strong and, if the attendance of our user group meetings is any indication, it’s growing stronger all the time. We’ve been bouncing around the idea of having an event here for a while, it was just finally the right time to step up and organize it. There’s a gap in the area covered by some of the major conferences with ZendCon out in California, and php|tek in Chicago. The CodeWorks conference has been here in town before, but they made the move down to Austin last year. It may not be the biggest conference out there (or the most well known) but we hope that it’ll bring the quality content to the DFW masses they expect out of a great conference.

The response so far has been great so far and tickets have already started selling, so if you’re planning on attending, be sure to grab your ticket – space is limited! The event costs $60 for the full day, including a lunch and an after-party event too. If you’re out of town and wanting to come in, we have some special rates there at the hotel you can get for that Friday and Saturday night – just email us and ask to get the details.

Lone Star PHP Conference: http://lonestarphp.com
On Facebook: http://facebook.com/lonestarconference
On Twitter: @lonestarphp