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Make Blogging Your New Years Resolution
04 January 2011
Read moreDo you have a New Year's Resolution? Is it to blog (or blog more often)? If so, keep reading!
I'm coming up to my 5th anniversary of blogging and looking at my stats, I've written around 150 posts per year for most of that time, although in 2010 I "only" wrote 102 posts, possibly because one or two other things happened in my life. So many people tell me they want to blog, or they have a blog but can't find the time to write, that I thought I'd try to give some pointers for those resolving to blog this New Year.
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Launching Links in Opera from Command Line
27 December 2010
Read moreI'm an Opera user but I use a number of applications from the command line, and often I want to launch links from those applications into my web browser. I've just switched over to reading my feeds using canto (web applications are becoming decreasingly accessible these days, although I'm saving …
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Speaking at DIBI
22 December 2010
Read moreIn June 2011 I'll be speaking at a rather awesome event called DIBI at the Sage in Gateshead (if you're a southerner, then Gateshead is near Newcastle, which is "up north"). DIBI stands for "Design It, Build It" and has two tracks, one focussing on development and one focussing on …
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Preparing for ZCE 5.3
20 December 2010
Read more|image1|Recently I have been getting to grips with the ZCE since it was updated to take account of PHP 5.3. In the last few weeks I've both passed the certificate myself and also taught Zend's certification training course as a classroom course at NTI Leeds. I thought I'd share my top tips for preparing for taking the ZCE - getting to the standard, last-minute preparations, and also some tips for surviving the day itself (disclaimer: everyone sitting the ZCE signs a declaration not to disclose the contents of the exam, so I can't actually tell you the questions, sorry!)
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OAuth Google API for Unregistered Applications
17 December 2010
Read moreIt is pretty common when using OAuth for there to be a relationship between the provider and consumer; as a consumer you usually register with the provider to obtain a consumer key and consumer secret. Google's APIs however do not require this. It is recommended that you register your application …
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ZCE 5.3: Worth Doing?
14 December 2010
Read moreI recently took (and passed!) the ZCE 5.3 certification. I've been a Zend Certified Engineer (5.0) for nearly 3 years, and I know a lot more about PHP today than I did then. Today I speak and write various things related to PHP, and also teach all sorts of topics including PHP certification. I thought I'd share my thoughts on the ZCE, and I'll write a follow-up post on how to prepare for it.
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Declaring Static Methods in PHP
10 December 2010
Read moreI was confused recently to realise that I had accidentally called a static method in PHP dynamically from another part of my code; I expected PHP to output warnings when this is done. On closer inspection I discovered that:
Static functions can be called dynamically
Dynamic functions generate an E_STRICT error if called statically
This made a lot more sense when I thought about it a bit more and wrote some toy code:
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Retrieving Data from Google Analytics API using PHP
09 December 2010
Read moreRecently I started playing with the google analytics API, looking at ways to bring analytics onto dashboards and generate simple reports from the data in there. Very shortly after I started to look at the API, I had working data retrieval, so I thought I'd share my experiences (and code!).
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Skills Analysis for Teams
06 December 2010
Read moreWhen I spoke at PHPNW10 in October, I talked about teams, skills and the importance of benchmarking things in order to illustrate improvements. If you didn't see the talk, the video and slides are linked off the conference site. In particular I talked about the importance of analysing skills in a team, then improving them, then analysing again to see how things had changed. This post is about that process, some techniques that might apply, and what to do with the results when you get them.
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PHPUnconference Comes to Manchester
30 November 2010
Read moreI'm very excited to hear that the PHPUnConference Europe (@phpuceu on twitter) is coming to Manchester on February 19th and 20th! So excited, in fact, that I've rushed out and bought my ticket (for a whole £40, that's a good investment in my opinion). The event brings together the PHP …
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3 Ways to Access a Namespaced PHP Class
29 November 2010
Read moreAfter what felt like years of debate over the notation to use for PHP's namespaces, it seems like the feature itself has had relatively little use or attention since it was actually implemented in PHP 5.3. We're all used to working without it but using it does make code neater.
Take this example (in a file called namespaced-class.php)
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Keynoting at PHPBenelux
25 November 2010
Read moreHave you got your tickets for PHPBenelux yet? If not then I hope you will do so because I would love to see you there!
I'll be delivering a keynote at the PHPBenelux Conference in Antwerp in January alongside my good friend Ivo Jansch. Between us we've got plenty of …
