If there’s one thing PHP needs, it’s a bit more convention. Node and Ruby can both attribute a large portion of their success to their respective package managers. Unfortunately PHP has such a… diverse history that using different components between frameworks and projects often requires a cumbersome set of differing bootstraps and loaders. PSR-0 looked set to be at least a partial solution; a common naming convention such that files could be loaded in the same way, regardless of their original framework. And they royally screwed it up. Continue reading »

Today marks three years since I began running. In that time I’ve gone from a wheezing 13 minute mile (and enough leg cramps to make me doubt ever walking again) to being able to run the Sutton Fun Run route (8.5 mi) in just over an hour (and getting my mile time down to 5:58 in the process). In that time I’ve learnt a few things, often the hard way, so here’s some tips on what’s worked for me for the 1,300 Km I’ve covered so far. Continue reading »

The first month of 2012 has already gone and I’m still yet to see my flying car or robot assistant. To make up for this I continued my cinema run, seeing 8 films in January. Unfortunately most of them sucked. Continue reading »

So, the total cinema visit count for this year was only 94 (down from last years 100+), but still a respectable amount. It was also the year we finally bothered to get Cineworld Unlimited cards, saving a small fortune! Anyway, here are my top 10 films of 2011. Continue reading »

The title may be a bit of a mouthful, but it explains the purpose of this post. Similar to my previous post, this guide serves as a reference for myself but I figured others might also find it useful. Continue reading »

I love my little Linode (shameless referral link), running several sites on the smallest instance available which gives just 512Mb of memory. With the popularity of HL Twitter and Plex Export, I pretty often max out the available memory and Apache starts dropping requests. So I recently set about looking at the best way to reduce my memory footprint and settled on dropping Nginx in front of Apache. This guide explains how and why. Continue reading »

Within the world of web applications, and much more relevantly within PHP, there is an abundant choice of frameworks available for use. It almost goes without saying that any project begun nowadays has at its foundation some form of framework, if only to remove the tedious repetition every project involves (requests, routes, database, caching etc). Within this world of frameworks though, two groups continually push to create new frameworks. Continue reading »

Since my last post on HL Twitter almost a month ago, I’ve accrued another 3,000 downloads bringing my total to just over 8,000. Now obviously this doesn’t mean 8,000 people are using my plugin, undoubtedly many of them are repeat downloads etc. But it does mean I now have a much larger userbase compared to my initial development, and with that comes “support requests”. Continue reading »

It’s always good when geeks get together. Well for geeks at least, most people’s eyes just glaze over at the first mention of programming. As such this is a quick bloggie to let all the web devs in the Brum area know about HydraHack, an informal meetup arranged by Tom Martin (a colleague at 383).

HydraHack is a monthly meetup for web developers in Birmingham, who enjoy getting together and making things.

Come along, show off your latest creation and have a few cuppas at Urban Coffee Co.

My first WordPress plugin, HL Twitter, was released six months ago and at the time of writing is just a few downloads under 5,000. So it was about time it got some much needed love! Continue reading »