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MIA/Past Week

June 27, 2009

For those of you that read this blog with any regularlity (and my hearty thanks to you), my apologies for the lack of posts this past week. I’ve had a bit of a personal emergency that’s put all other tasks on the far back burner. I hope to start posting again by the end of this forthcoming week, including some detailed posts on the Yii framework.

Through Amazon’s Author Connect service, Amazon.com now has a “home page” for my work. Right now, my author page there lists all of my books, has my bibliography, and displays the feed for this blog (which means, in a circular connection, this post about Amazon’s service will show up there, too). In time Amazon plans on adding more features. This doesn’t really affect me much, although if it helps people find my work, all the better. The best thing for me is that I no longer have to maintain two blogs: my own and one at Amazon.

Through an Amazon service, this blog is now available for reading on Amazon’s Kindle. It’s a subscription service, priced at $1.99/month (for what it’s worth Amazon sets the price and keeps most of the money). I don’t know what kind of interest there is in this, but I thought I’d make it an option. This does mean I’ll need to work harder to make the blog content meaningful, though, if people will be paying good money for it! If there’s anything you’d like to see in this blog, or see more or less of, please let me know.

A Little Downtime

December 21, 2008

There won’t be any new posts for the next week as I’m planning on taking some time off to enjoy the holidays. I will post some more before the end of the year, though, and I have already started some very rough drafts. The topics to be covered over the next month or so include better error reporting, choosing development tools (IDE’s and text editors), and some notes on the 2008 Adobe MAX conference and my first foray into Flex and Flex Builder. Thanks for your interest in what I have to say and happy holidays to those that celebrate holidays around this time of year.

Ruby, PHP, and Frameworks

November 30, 2008

I began my computer consulting career in 1999 as a PHP programmer. For several years, all of the Web sites I created were written in PHP. (I have done a couple of ASP.NET sites, and although I find the technology and the development tools to be impressive, the requirements that you develop and run ASP.NET on Windows is a non-starter for me.) In 2005, while at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, I first played with the Ruby on Rails framework, released a couple of months earlier. So, like many people, I came to Ruby after seeing how brilliant the Rails framework was. At that time, there really were no PHP frameworks that were comparable, although perhaps the Zend Framework, among others, are close enough today. I wanted to talk a bit about how I see PHP and Ruby, but first, a discussion of frameworks… Continue Reading…