• MediaPost Publications – Shift From Traditional To Online Media Contributing To Ad Economy Slowdown – 06/16/2008 – Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fpublications.mediapost.com%2Findex.cfm%3Ffuseaction%3DArticles.san%26s%3D84682%26Nid%3D43911%26p%3D321097
• Application Flow Chart : CodeIgniter User Guide – A great diagram that could be used to describe any web development framework like Django, Rails, CakePHP, and the Zend Framework
• Rands In Repose: We Travel in Tribes – Twitter is a social network, yes, but it?s a social network without the superpoke scrabtaculous zombie noise and, for that, I?m thankful, because I?ve got work to do. Yes, I could spend days tidying my profile and scrubbing my friends list, but to w
• #6813 (Viva la bookmarklet – quick posting from around the web) – WordPress Trac – Trac – My Quick Post plugin getting implemented into WordPress 2.6 core as Press It
• The future of PHP –

• Python Stuff –
• Zappos.com Takes Twitter By Storm, Hosts San Francisco Party | –
• RN&R > Local Stories > Surfing without > 04.24.08 – I’m quoted twice. Once as director of business development and the other time as a programmer. I like both titles!
• Alert Thingy 1.3 Released: Single User Interface For Twitter And FriendFeed –
• Ski Alpine Meadows – Client Blog
• Do you want to become a great developer? – Fredrik Normén –

• Coding time: Subversion visually explained in 30 sec – Nice little visual representation
• The Python Challenge –
• Microsoft Vista Code – Not very nice but funny.
• You Use It Every Day. But Can You Make It Cook? – New York Times –
• Dr. Dobb’s | Identifying Top Developers – Great notes on how to interview and hire developers.

• FriendFeed Comments WordPress Plugin – Development on a Shoestring –
• Fold-Ins, Past and Present – The New York Times –
• Google Code for Educators –
• Ryan Jerz :: Reno Blogger, Reno Blog >> The Terri Patraw Experience: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (allegedly) – Good example of blogger integrity in the face of threatening lawsuits
• Little Einsteins: Race for Space DVD Giveaway – My first giveaway on disneyfrontier.com

I know that I said I was intent on never programming in PHP again, but that’s what our company uses and that’s what WordPress is written in. 

When I reviewed CakePHP, the Zend Framework was very young (I think it was like version 0.6). It’s now in version 1.5 and very capable. It has all the Model-View-Controller (MVC) components as well as a plethora of web services libraries that were very easy to implement. In just a few hours, I took the YouTube library and created a topic specific video browser on my other blog. The documentation was good and there is plenty of community support.

I like how it stores the core code of your application out of the path of what is publicly browsable. It gives it a more clean secure feel. I also like that installation basically consists of copy one directory to your web server – however, it only runs on PHP 5. Caching in the Zend Framework is just a few lines of code, making it a no brainer when it comes to web services.

It does have a few trade offs. It doesn’t have scaffolding or auto form creation like the other’s have. It’s newly implemented Forms library is a little cumbersome. It’s database support, while varied, feels less than integrated.

I think all in all, it’s a great framework. I haven’t touched Cake since 1.1, so I can’t compare it to their current version. I would recommend it to any PHP developer. If you are interested, check out Killer PHP’s tutorials.

Anyone compared it to the latest version of CakePHP? Any new PHP frameworks out there that rock and roll?

In the meantime, you can get Mikkel’s version here: QuickPost for WordPress with tags and the option to disable comments at blog.detersmart.dk

Alex King and his team over at Crowd Favorites has been working with the Yahoo and the Yahoo Shortcuts team to create an awesome WordPress Plugin. For those who don’t know, Alex King is an awesome plugin developer and has been working with the WordPress team since its inception.

Yahoo Shortcuts basically looks for key terms and provides shortcuts to content that might be relevant. Examples would be maps, stock tickers, and photos. By using the Shortcuts API, Alex was able to filter the content of a post through these shortcuts to allow the author to include some of this rich content in their post.

I’m using it on this post and it picked up Yahoo Shortcuts and WordPress and linked them to their respective sites. If I reference that Alex is located in Denver, CO, it will pick that location up and provide a map. It also found a few images of Denver from Flickr, one of which I included in this post. All the images it pulls from Flickr are creative commons and the attribute is added as needed to the photos.

The plugin is beta and has a few quirks. First, I couldn’t use it in Safari (this post was done in Firefox). I’m sure this has more to do with the version of TinyMCE included in WordPress and it’s poor support for Safari. Second, when I went to review the post in the shortcuts editor screen, I saw a few foreach errors related to flickr (I think it was the comma in Denver, CO). And overall, it’s slow.
Despite these issues, if you are looking for ways to spruce up your blog posts, I recommend this plugin. It’s only going to get better. And congrats to Alex and his team on working on such a great project.

You can download it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yahoo-shortcuts/

Check out Alex’s post about it here: http://alexking.org/blog/2007/12/13/yahoo-shortcuts

Also, Alex and Jeremy Zawodny did a screencast demo of the plugin here: http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?cl=5251111

-Rewrote the bookmarklet javascript
-Fixed the photo bug with flickr
-Made the photos tab the default when on flickr
-Made photos linkable by adding a url. Leave it blank to prevent the link.
-Got the WordPress svn to show the correct version number

Determined to never code in PHP again, I set out to choose between Ruby and Python. Both have very powerful feature sets for languages that are for the most part scripting languages. Many things went into the decision – a topic for another blog post, but I decided Python was the language I wanted to use moving forward.I had played with Python in the past, but in a few short days I went through the first 9 sections of the tutorial at python.org. Having coded for the better part of 10 years, it wasn’t difficult to pick up.

Immediately after this course, I jumped into Django. Django is the Python equivalent of Rails (Rails uses Ruby) or CakePHP for PHP. It has many similarities to Rails and a few differences. I’m still in the early learning stages of Django and only made it through the Pragmatic Programmer book with Rails, so I’d say I’m not yet qualified to compare and contrast the differences completely.

Two of the biggest differences from a development standpoint is URL handling and AJAX. URL handing is handled manually with Django and automatically with Rails. Handling URLs manually allows the developer to do some pretty amazing things, but it requires the developer to maintain url.py files. As far as AJAX, Rails has built in support meaning you are tied to the Prototype JavaScript library while Django allows the developer to use their own library of choice – I prefer jQuery. This choice means you have to handle all the AJAX yourself rather than leaving it to the framework. However, using views this is pretty painless in Django (views are equivalent to controllers in Rails).

Hosting is another difference to consider. I won’t go into all the ways that one could run Rails or Django, but I will say the most popular method for Django is mod_python for Apache. However, most web hosts don’t offer this as a default. And because of the popularity that Rails has achieved, more hosts are offering Rails hosting more than mod_python hosting. A lot more could be said on this topic.

All in all, I think either choice has some pros and cons. Hopefully more and more developers will migrate to one or the other and leave PHP behind. Good PHP developers will love the power and true object oriented nature of both Python and Ruby. Bad PHP developers should leave the coding up to professionals.