Yesterday I (finally, finally, finally) posted another update to " The Yii Book". This is version 0.7, with two new chapters:

• Chapter 15, “Internationalization”
• Chapter 16, “Leaving the Browser”

This adds about 40 more pages of material, bringing the total to around 405 pages as a PDF.

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) are two important topics for web developers. There are plenty of recommended books on these subjects, such as Steve Krug’s " Don’t Make Me Think", and very thoughtful work being done by the good people at A List Apart and User Interface Engineering, among many others. But even if you don’t have the time and inclination to spend hours mastering these subjects (and, sometimes, the underlying psychology involved), a decent amount of UI/UX should come down to common sense. I’ve grabbed a couple of snapshots of recent issues I’ve seen at a couple of different web sites.

Last month, Lorna Jane Mitchell posted an article titled " Consuming REST with PHP and Streams". In the article, Ms. Mitchell demonstrates a clever way to use RESTful services from PHP, making use of streams. This is arguably a better alternative to the standard approach of using PHP’s cURL extension. It’s a clever solution, and not one I’d come across before.

Over the weekend, I gave my " How to (not) Get Rich Writing Books" presentation at the 2013 Pittsburgh TechFest. I’ve posted my slides at SpeakerDeck, with my presentation notes. My notes are essentially my verbatim script, which I first write out, then memorize, and then try to forget sufficiently to make the actual presentation feel more natural.

You can view the slides below, or at SpeakerDeck.

I’ve been catching up with watching, or listening to, presentations and speeches that I’ve bookmarked over the past year. (It ends up being a “two birds with one stone” situation, as I watch/listen to them as I exercise. I’m also exercising to MIT’s " Introduction to Computer Science and Programming" course at iTunes U, but who doesn’t?) One such speech that I just listened to was " Admiral Shovel and the Toilet Roll" by James Burke.

I am pleased to announce that I’ve just signed a contract to write the second edition of my " Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL" book, published by New Riders. The first edition was written in the fall of 2010, and has been very well received (out of 22 reviews at Amazon, 18 are 5-star). There was more I wanted to do in the first edition, and a few things have changed since the book was written, so my publisher and I felt it was time for a revision. I’ll be writing the book at the end of the summer and early fall (after I complete " The Yii Book"), with a release date in October or November.