Spun

Someone asked me today about where to get started learning PHP. There are so many ad-covered pop-up launching PHP tutorial/community sites out there that teach you how to learn PHP3, I told him to check out the tutorial from the horse’s mouth on PHP.net, and a nice beginner area on the Zend site as well. Any other good ones I missed?

Drop a Google Map onto your web page with PHP, easy as pie with Phoogle and a Google Maps API key. Gawker Stalker’s crying out for this.

Technorati is listing Yahoo! Japan as its most popular “blog,” right now, above BoingBoing. Bug? Inside joke? Who knows.

Ever since I started posting to Lifehacker several times a day, I’ve developed a deep resentment for the software that publishes the site, MovableType. There are days when it takes between 40 and 50 seconds to publish a single post. Fifty seconds probably doesn’t sound like a long time to you, but when you do it a couple of dozen times a day - what with edits and updates - we’re talking about almost half an hour of my life, snatched from me. I’m a perpetual mugging victim.
I sit at my computer every day watching MT publish each post at the pace of a tiny, moist snail travelling across a vast stone and I can feel myself getting old. Any software that gives you the time to deeply consider the seconds of your life ticking away, any software that makes you hate it by evoking the image of yourself hurdling from cradle to grave while gazing at its wrench logo - this is not software to be used by someone who is not a masochist.
Now, I have to give MT the benefit of the doubt. It may not be MT that’s slow - it may be a non-performant plugin, or the fact that over 20 editors are posting to 17 sites using one MT installation (though that doesn’t seem too unreasonable for a multi-user system). It may be that our servers are shitty (though I doubt it, Nick’s thrown some serious cash at our server situation and hosting facility). The folks at SixApart (one of whom is my friend - hi Anil!) did an amazing thing with MovableType, which was raise the bar for personal publishing systems way higher than Blogger set it.
But that was then.
Now, Gawker’s got a tech team of talented people who are unable to figure out what makes MT so freaking slow even working with SixApart support to figure it out. Now, we’ve got comments publishing in batch - not real-time - because the servers couldn’t handle MT’s heavy republishing process. We’ve got a publishing server sync’ing to front-end web servers - because one server couldn’t handle MT’s heavy republishing process plus the serving of static HTML files which costs, oh I don’t know, nothing. We’ve got ME pulling my HAIR out every day simply trying to get my job done with a tool that, from this user’s perspective, feels nothing but broken. The fact that the TypePad site I contribute to, Misbehaving, is raped by uncontrollable spam comments every day only confirms my distrust of the MT codebase.
My brief experience here with WordPress and a few useful plugins, in comparison, has been heaven.
And so the next raising of the bar.

Here’s a really neat DHTML expand and collapse tree view for list items. Simply include a javascript and CSS file into your page, then apply the appropriate ID’s to your list. Check out my quick and dirty demo.

Thanks, Su!

Happened upon this personal site by Garrett Murray today, via torrez, and found the design really inspiring. I love sites with a dark background and light text - so much easier to read. I like how there’s lots of empty space but that navigation links appear when you rollover the post and titles, wondering what’s what. I used to dog Ruby on Rails sites for always having the same look - the big headlines, certain font families and colors. I don’t know if it’s the default style in the Rails view templates or the fact that Rails fans are influenced by 37 Signals or what - but Maniacal Rage doesn’t. Just looking at it I couldn’t tell what CMS or platform publishes it which is rare with most blogs. (Give it a try - lots of TypePad, WordPress, MT, RoR and Blogger sites are identifiable by style.)
Bonus: there’s no drop shadow or rounded corners, which are really getting on my nerves lately. *stares at drop shadows on this page*
Anyway, if I were a designer, this is the kind of site I’d want to create. It’s got my wheels turning about my sad, poor, bare scribbling.net.

Google Sitemaps looks really cool. From what I can see of it, you submit an XML document which defines a map of your site - page locations, their update frequency and priority - and the Googlebot indexes as you specify (though Google doesn’t make any promises, presumably to discourage spammers and rogue SEOers). Looks like they’re going to provide site stats based on sitemaps as well.

I told the MSN Search team last month that tools for web publishers - like stats, popularity rankings of pages, configurable internal site search - would be the killer app that would get site publishers to adopt and spread a particular brand’s search box. Looks like the big G is headed in that direction.

And! They’re accepting pings when a site changes!!