What is next for message board software?
When I was hired at dealnews.com in 1998, my primary focus was to get our message board (Phorum) up to speed. I had written the first version as a side project for the site. Message boards were a lot ...
Sharing gotchas on Facebook and Twitter
I have been working on adding some sharing features to dealnews.com. Dealing with Facebook and Twitter has been nothing if not frustrating. Neither one seems to understand how to properly deal with es...
Monitoring PHP Errors
PHP errors are just part of the language. Some internal functions throw warnings or notices and seem unavoidable. A good case is parse_url. The point of parse_url is to take apart a URL and tell me th...
Boycott NuSphere. They are spammy spammers
It took a lot for me to finally write this post. I tweeted about it a while back. It seems NuSphere needs more business. They have resorted to spamming people to promote their PhpED product. I have go...
PHP 5.3 and mysqlnd - Unexpected results
I have started seriously using PHP 5.3 recently due to it finally making it into Portage. (Gentoo really isn't full of bleeding edge packages people.) I have used mysqlnd a little here and there in th...
PHP and Memcached: The state of things
Memcached is the de facto standard for caching in dynamic web sites. PHP is the one of the most widely used languages on the web. So, naturally there is lots of interest in using the two together. The...
PHP generated code tricks
Something that is great about PHP is that you can write code that generates more PHP code to be used later. Now, I am not saying this a best practice. I am sure it violates some rule in some book some...
MySQL Conference Review
I am back home from a good week at the 2010 O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo. I had a great time and got to see some old friends I had not seen in a while.Oracle gave the opening keynote and it we...
DevOps at dealnews.com
I was telling someone how we roll changes to production at dealnews and they seemed really amazed by it. I have never really thought it was that impressive. It just made sense. It has kind of happened...
Logging with MySQL
I was reading a post by Dathan Vance Pattishall titled "Cassandra is my NoSQL solution but..". In the post, Dathan explains that he uses Cassandra to store clicks because it can write a lot faster tha...