Nick Halstead's Blog: Boycott WordPress?
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With all of the push to move to PHP5 these days, some people are asking more questions of some of the most common PHP applications as to how they plan to proceed. Nick Halstead asks his question on his blog today - should the community boycott WordPress?   Technology moves forward and PHP will long term lose its dominant position unless it gets everyone to move along with it. [...] Frankly I use WordPress because it has the best plugins but it is no coding wonder and Matt [Mullenweg]'s energies would be better placed helping to move it to PHP 5 only.   The reference there is to a post from Matt (from the WordPress project) going after the community a bit for trying to force a move to PHP5 and that it's "not a big deal" like some are making it out to be. Nick feels that, if it's the case that Matt doesn't even see the move to PHP5 as a big deal, maybe WordPress shouldn't be the one of the blogging tools of choice.
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The Hiveminds Magazine has pointed out a new effort that's been kicked off today to try to get the PHP community (and providers) to finally make the leap and drop PHP4 support all together:   The idea is to make a unified, concentrated effort to drop PHP4 support and drive PHP5 adoption in the year 2008. Think of it. All CMS, forum and framework projects going completely over to PHP5 on a set date! This would be like a bomb dropping on the web hosting world and cause ripples throughout the open source world.   They point out some of the projects that are leaning either way from ezPublish hanging on to PHP4 and apps like Drupal that have embraced PHP5. In fact, it's the Drupal group that's written up the proposal on how it would all go down - the "Go PHP5 Effort".   It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The open source PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed open source PHP projects have all agreed that effective 5 February 2008, any new feature release will have a minimum  required PHP version no older than PHP 5.2.0.   There's tons of comments to the proposal in both parties (and some in between noting that there are already several PHP4 applications that run quite happily on PHP5).
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With the recent acquisition Sun has made (you heard about that, right?), there's tons of resources in the open source community that are talking about it, lots of them are more PHP-specific. Cal Evans has put together a list of some of the PHP bloggers/community memembers that have posted some of their thoughts on the purchase.   With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.   Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.
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Although Userland have been kind enough to let me stay on, I have decided it might be wiser to self-host this site. So I intend to move to http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/ I have managed to preserve the content, but the article comments were not ported over. Kindly update your links. This will be the last post on the site. The RSS feed will be http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/?q=node/feed/1 Thanks for all the fish. PS: I am using drupal.
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If you downloaded WordPress version 2.1.1 within the last week, upgrade to 2.1.2 right now to avoid exploitable code inserted by a cracker. Plus: We try out Opera's spill-proof OLPC. In Monkey Bites.
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We turned off share.opml.org yesterday, for good, as far as I know. It was a good idea, but we never got it together to make it the powerhouse I wanted it to be.  Now that Google and Bloglines both have discovery mechanisms for feeds that you might like, based on what you and others like, there would only be a future for SYO if it were a thriving and growing community, and it isn't.  Normally, I'd leave a site like that running indefinitely, but this one needed its own server, and I wanted to cut my server expenses now that my S3 bill is going up, serving some very big JPEGs and generally being the back-end for a community that is growing, the people using FlickrFan. If there's a big demand to bring it back, we can -- but that's going to require cash flow to go with it. At this point, I don't think it's a good investment for me. Still diggin!
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Here's a zip archive containing the source of the last 10 years of Scripting News. Since Scripting News existed before blogs were invented, I went ahead and included the stuff that I blogged before there were blogs. I hope this isn't too confusing!  "cheesecake" PS: Scott Karp asks if blogs can do journalism. Try this question. Can journalists do journalism? At best they seem to be able to copy each other, so mistakes propogate.  We've made so many accomplishments, both before and after the coining of the term, Karp for example starts with VIgnette. In 1997 if you told someone the functions of Vignette could be provided to millions of people virtually for free they wouldn't have believed you. (This is factual btw, I did, and wasn't believed.)  They also thought syndication would be done by the big publishing companies, something unweildy called ICE. We thought it should be simpler so that anyone could support it on both ends, and we won. The journalists have no record of this probably because they believed the big companies behind ICE and ignored the low-tech stuff. Jorn Barger used my software to do his "web log" -- why isn't that part of the story? Well it isn't if all you think is important is the choosing of the name.
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Back in February, Ralph Green asked me to speak at the North Texas Linux Users' Group. I discussed Linux administration and then took questions. Some one in the audience asked me about Mono. I gave a cavalier answer having a bias against it. Then someone else in the audience said that I needed to get my facts straight.
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Sam Hennessy has submitted a link today concerning a method for integrating PRADO and WordPress together to make a simple multi-user environment.   From te post by javalizard:   I've been wanting to share with all you something new and special.  I've needed to use Wordpress Multiuser as blogging software (it's supported and has new releases once in a while and people know how to use it) with PRADO.  Auxiliary is the integration of BBPress too.  Basically, it's a single login system for prado, blogs, and forums.   This setup lets you manage user information (roles, permissions, abilities) for WordPress through PRADO, handles user authentication and applies WordPress code libraries (actions/filters) and plugins.
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If you're both a WordPress an Mint user and are wanting to integrate them the easy way, check out this new entry from Chris Hartjes about combining the two.   Now, the installation is fairly easy but there was a weird bug that was appearing, where a check to see if you are running a licensed copy of Mint kept getting triggered when I tried to access my feeds via a feed alias. The solution? An ugly hack, if you ask me.   The problem was with a Pepper for Mint called Bird Feeder Pepper that helps track RSS feed usage. The solution he found was a snippet of PHP code you'll need to insert into several of the feed scripts WordPress offers (as provided).
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There's a fascinating debate today going on about Scoble and his Facebook data. Here's the story so far. Plaxo, on behalf of Scoble, ran a screen scraper on his Facebook account to download information about at least some of his Facebook friends. Facebook detected the scraper and turned off his account, with an email explaining that he had violated their terms of service. The debate: Who is right -- Scoble or Facebook? While there are certainly arguments that Facebook has some rightness, most of it, imho, is with Scoble. Sure, some of the data may "belong" to his friends, like their birthday and mail address. Technically of course the data doesn't belong to anyone, it's data about them, and many organizations have this data. Are bloggers really saying that organizations have more rights than people? Isn't blogging all about a level playing field? My bank knows my birthday and my email address. Why shouldn't Scoble? (Maybe he shouldn't.) Scoble called a few minutes ago. I asked what the consensus was. He said it was about 70 percent in his favor, 30 percent in Facebook's. I think we can win over the 30 percent by saying that there should be a system whereby people can decide how much information they want to share with Scoble, or people like Scoble, or me, or people like me, or BofA or the DEA, KGB or CIA. Further, that system is not Facebook, unless they change.  Now, I think there's a pretty good chance that Facebook will change and give Scoble his data and turn his account back on. I think Facebook wants to give us access to our data, but if they just turned the feature on, there would be a shitstorm, kind of like the one that's raging right now. Except this time Facebook has defenders, which they must find refreshing, because every time there's been a shitstorm around Facebook they've always been seen as 100 percent evil by most people. (Not by me, btw.) Maybe they're getting smart there over at Facebook. Maybe they will relent, kind of admit they were wrong, and secretly be happy that they got to open their network up some more.  However, if Facebook doesn't open up and allow people a system to say who can access what information, we still have to create that system somehow. Google could have done it, but they didn't. Same with Yahoo or Microsoft. These companies don't want to empower the users, but if they studied history, they'd see that the evolution of computers always comes in fits and starts. A period when the technology is new and people are snowed by the companies and let them have full control. Gradually people understand what's going on, and figure out they're being screwed but they accept it. And then explosively the whole thing disintegrates in a new layer of technology.  It's a big effin loop we're in. One of these times around one of the companies that feels (incorrectly) that they have a lock on their users, will voluntarily give it up and be a leader in Generation N+1. I've never seen it happen, but in theory I think it could.  In other words, Apple and Microsoft could have invented the web instead of TBL. DEC and Data General could have invented the personal computer instead of Apple and Microsoft (I know this is a simplification, there were lots of individuals and small companies that did it.) And IBM could have invented the minicomputer instead of DEC and Data General. And btw, the NY Times and CNN could have invented blogging and RSS.  So Facebook has the opportunity to be a crossover company, part of the next generation -- or a last gasp of the generation that's about to run out of gas. It's their choice. And it's fitting somehow that Scoble is the poster child for users in this cycle.
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With The New York Times picking up the recent story of the (mostly minor) anti-Adblock Plus protest, its worth looking into the subject and seeing just where a Webmaster/ad-block developer arms race could take us.
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This is really cool!  I finally get my own comment spam!  For some reason I felt left out of the party.  I just wasn't cool enough for the spammers to consider me worthy of their spam.  Anyway.  I implemented my own little turing test.  Now the comments say:  {{{  Turing Test: Are you a human? (required. Just type yes... this is for automated spam prevention)  }}}  While this wouldn't work for all blogs in the wild I'm sure it will work just fine here in my little corner of the blogosphere.  If spammers really want my blog enough then I'll deploy a captcha.  If they solve the captcha I'll deploy a sentient robot  which will traceroute packets back to the host and then terminate with prejudic ...
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way. Nobody&#39;s exactly sure why or how the FBI got warrants to take Indymedia&#39;s HDs, but their
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A few days back there was a post on the "The Codist" blog about why the author would never quite understand the appeal of PHP to the masses and some of his thoughts behind it. Well, there was such an outcry and response to his comments that he's written up another post on what he learned from comments made.   Clearly I touched a nerve. However I did learn a lot of things that you don't read in a quickly tutorial on PHP. The whole point of writing something is to get feedback, positive or negative, and hopefully learn from it.   He admits that his experience with PHP and its developers has been limited, so his perspective might have been thrown off a bit. He still holds to one thing from the previous article, though - that PHP just isn't for him.
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Sam blogs about his wiki spam problems  and implements a posting throttle.  With new spam-capable zombie PCs and with wikis that aren't updated very often this isn't a solution.  If I were to go back to my wiki after a month it would be covered with spam links.  One strong solution is emergent and distributed social whitelists (AKA my FOAFKey  proposal).  With a FOAFKey enabled wiki/weblog you could allow a whitelist of a few hundred thousand users to post to the wiki without any problems.  All they would need to enter is their email address for confirmation (or the SHA1 hash of their email).  For the rare times when the user isn't within the original whitelist we can just have the user uplo ...
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Felix Geisendorfer is in the process of moving his blog from Wordpress to a customized "light-weight CakePHP replacement" he's developing to be extended later on. His post shares some of the tips he found so far.   In this post I'm simply going to throw out some snippets to show how I'm currently approaching the whole process in order to give both my insight into what works and what doesn't, while also hoping to get some people to share their insight into migrating legacy apps to CakePHP.   The tip in this post is primarily about the database side of things - his porting over of the information from the Wordpress table model to his new customized schema. His code example for the migration is included.