It's a Doozy!
http://whencanireusethiscalendar.com/
Now you can go digging through that chest of crap from the 1990s and pull out your favorite cute puppies calendar. In 2010, you can re-use calendars from 1999, 1993, 1982, 1971, 1965, 1954, 1943, and 1937.
Thanks to the site Feed43.com, I was able to quickly and easily generate an RSS feed to the PHP5 Changelog, a very large page that doesn’t already have a feed.
Check out the PHP 5 Changelog Feed.
Feed43 beats Yahoo’s Tubes service because if a page is too large, it simply truncates it to a usable length. Tubes will simply fail to process a page that it deems is too big.
As a professional PHP developer who enjoys helping others learn about the language, I have noticed several phases of PHP skill development. One of the first phases is when one stops piling all of their code into one file and starts storing their classes and specialized logic into reusable files. For some, this change brings on a wave of problems that may be very difficult to track down.
At some point, many PHP developers run into an inexplicable White Page of Death or at least stubborn cookies and headers that won’t change when they should. A common cause is include files with white space after the PHP closing tag. Your web server might send these characters to the browser before you process your header() or setcookie() calls, causing them to fail. PHP allows for a single newline after a PHP closing tag before it starts interpreting characters as output.
Omit PHP closing tags
The PHP closing tag is useful when you embed PHP into a page that already contains other content such as an HTML template. However, if you only intend to have PHP logic in a page and nothing else, you can omit the final PHP closing tag:
<?php
$test = new testClass();
$test->helloWorld();
// End of PHP script. No closing tag needed.
This approach does not incur any additional resource penalty to the server.
Output Buffering
If you feel that you need to send output before processing headers and cookies, you should use output buffering. The ob_* class of PHP functions are very useful in these circumstances, but be aware that it comes at the cost of an increased memory footprint and slightly slower processing.
Error Logging
Instead of silently failing or dying with a white page of death, error logging would tell you exactly what is failing and why:
[24-Oct-2008 15:17:31] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /websites/demo/htdocs/whitespace.php:5) in /websites/demo/htdocs/cookie.php on line 8
I suggest everyone who develops in PHP do so with log_errors enabled. If develop with logging on from the beginning of your project, you will quickly capture potential problems before they grow too great in number and become overwhelming.
I prefer to set my error_reporting level to “E_ALL & E_STRICT” because many standards and best practices are enforced with these messages. (E_STRICT will be included as part of E_ALL in PHP 6)
Once you have logging enabled, you can SSH into your server and “tail” your error log for real-time error output:
[ian@devbox]~ tail -f /tmp/php.log
Using the “-f” flag will follow the log and give continuous output as it appears in the log file.
Please note that logging should be used sparingly (at least at a higher error_reporting level) in production servers. Also, I advise against using PHP’s display_errors in any case, especially production servers. In a production environment, this argument can provide dangerous information to site visitors. You may find it useful in development, but I find that not all errors will be visible or readable when output within your page. However, your log files will never let you down.
Many websites offer the flexibility to display the same page via both SSL and HTTP. The major problem with offering this is the possibility that embedded content will not be served via the same protocol; many browsers will throw an error if an SSL page embeds HTTP images.
However, there is a simple and W3C valid solution to this problem. Simply omit the protocol and colon from the URL:
<img src="http://isnoop.net/sa/av.jpg">
becomes
<img src="//isnoop.net/sa/av.jpg">
This works with embedding images, links, javascript embeds, and other link types.
The drawback to doing this everywhere is that you must be conscious as to whether the resource you are linking to is available on both SSL and HTTPS. Embedded scripts from services like Google Analytics are well served by this technique. If your enterprise uses a dedicated image hosting server, this is also a highly appropriate solution.
Below is an email I got through Zend’s certified engineer website. The questions posed by the writer below are not uncommon, so I have posted his letter and my response for general consumption.
Hi,
I am an aspiring PHP programmer. I need some advice from the right people like you before taking a plunge into PHP. I know to know what the future holds for PHP in the web development sector. Why is there more demand for ASP.net or Java than PHP when PHP is the best option available for web development. I have heard that PHP professionals are some of the least paid people in the industry, is this true? why should I not go for ASP.NET or Java as compared to PHP? I know it all comes to one’s interest but knowing a stable path for career is also essential. Please help me and my many other colleagues who want to join the PHP community. Your kind help would be highly a appreciated. Please be frank to give your advice.
–Vibhor S.
Vibhor,
Thanks for your email. From my point of view, I am inclined to believe that PHP is actually in higher demand than ASP or Java. However, the latter two are likely to be more common for large companies. I believe this is mostly the result of corporate decision making and the antiquated belief that PHP is not enterprise class. Companies like Facebook, Flickr, and Digg are rapidly dispelling that myth.
The roots of the enterprise class myth also help to explain the question of compensation. PHP started off as a hobbyist’s language. From there, it became the de facto scripting language for low-cost web hosts. As a result, a lot of personal and small business websites sprung up with PHP as a back end. Lacking the project and budget size of medium and large companies, most jobs available to PHP developers were (and perhaps continue to be) for less pay. This is not to say that there are not good paying PHP jobs available. I live in Seattle and am one of a group of 6 PHP developers for a medium sized company. I believe we are competitively compensated compared to the industry at large.
The other part of the compensation problem might have to do with the experience curve of PHP programmers. I have seen many developer resumes and the large majority of people who claim to be PHP experts are in fact novices or even beginners. PHP is a very simple language to learn and become comfortable with, but that comfort is not the same as knowing (and using) best practices, OOP, or even PHP5. Many PHP developers haven’t had any experience working in a collaborative environment and, frankly, may not be suitable for full-time work in a group of developers.
On the question of why one should choose PHP over ASP.NET or Java, I cannot answer. I chose PHP as my language of choice for personal and perhaps arbitrary reasons. I like that it is open source, works best on *NIX systems, is in active development, offers a tool for just about any job, and has a wide and varied user base. It also helps that the language happens to have a sustainable number of companies offering full-time work for PHP developers.
One might just as well choose Java, ASP.NET, Ruby, Python, Perl, C++, or any other popular web language for their own set of reasons. You’ll find ample work with any of these under your belt. Some might have a brighter future than others, but you’ll still find COBOL programmers out there making pretty good money despite the dwindling need for their chosen skills.
I hope this helps. Good luck with your programming.
–Ian
Last year, I tested and passed the Zend PHP 4 certification. Once again, I have overcome great adversity and climbed the highest figurative mountains in order to qualify and quantify my bountiful PHP skills.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to announce my acceptance of Zend Certified Engineer: PHP 5.
Tune in this time next year for my PHP 6 hat trick.