I am on a mission to get to grips with using the Zend Framework for building web applications. At MOO, the Zend Framework is used in it’s more toolkit-like component library capacity and I’m also pretty familiar with its structure from previous work with Magento (although that always seemed to over-complicate it). Using it as a full stack framework however, is a different challenge all together.

Having to include an entire PHP OAuth library every time I want to make a simple API request for some of my own data from a 3rd party app like Twitter really pisses me off. Perhaps this is unreasonable, but it’s a problem I ran into for the 4th or 5th time today when trying to help John O’Nolan fetch his status count for his blog.

There is some mystery time warp device which absorbs time when you’re having fun. There is also a nasty tunnel monster which lives on Britain’s railways and gobbles up all your freetime whilst you’re travelling to and from work. At least, it does when you commute from Northampton to London every day.

In the middle of writing a blog post about generating placeholder text (think lipsum..coming soon) I started wondering why there is no HTML-native way to load arbitrary content into an element. API’s and RESTful services are all over the web these days, but we continue to have to jump through hoops to access them. Either [...]

On the 19th March I’m going to be attending “State of the Browser“. It’s an event hosted by the London Web Standards group for “web creators” to get the low down on up-and-coming features of the 4 modern browsers.

Tickets for the event are £10 and are still available on Eventbrite. You can follow tweets about the event via the hashtag #lwsbrowser

If you work with multiple environments (development, staging, production etc) when building WordPress sites, you’ll know that WordPress uses hardcoded absolute URLs in the database for various tasks. There are lots of arguments as to why this is done, and whether it’s the best solution, but for now it remains quite difficult to migrate WordPress between environments.