Five by Five

I tend to subscribe to quite a few sites on a regular basis and have quite a few RSS feeds in my reader of choice. I have quite a broad range of topics I like to follow, but sometimes I come across a site where there is really only one bit I want to follow, but the site has only one feed url split into categories. This presents me with a problem as I only really want to visit the feed when there is a story from the category I want to follow. My feed reader will tell me when there are new items in the feed but not when there are new items just from my category in the feed. In this situation I have not subscribed to the feed and just visit the site periodically if I remember.

Yesterday I stumbled upon one such site. A colleague sent me a link to a site which has a segment called “Zero Punctuation”. After watching this segement and laughing so much I almost cried I was hooked. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen this before, it was a regular segment, lets subscribe to this feed. But no, not that easy, the site only had a general feed. Another site to try and remember to visit.

After my exclamation of dismay Ben, who I sit next to, suggested why not use Yahoo Pipes to customise the feed to my liking. What a brilliant suggestion, I had wanted to try out pipes for a while but hadn’t had a good reason. Today I set about the task of creating this feed and it turned out to be incredibly simple. After logging into the site here are the steps I went through to create my feed.

1. Add a Fetch Feed Module and enter the feed url.

2. Add a filter module to site

3. Link up the modules

4. Save the pipe

It was that simple. By choosing to get this pipe as RSS I had an alternative feed URL which I could use in my reader which gave me exactly what I wanted. It was so easy I created another one for another site which I wanted to subscribe to but up until now was unable to. Here are the URLs to my new feeds, the content of which are not very work friendly, so you have been warned! They will also probably be empty because they are so periodical that there is often no content in the feed which matches my criteria, rest assured though if there was your feed reader would tell you…

• Zero Punctuation
• The Register: BOFH

…well, actually, I didn’t say it, a website about Java said it!

“PHP scales. There, I said it. The word on the street is that “Java scales and PHP doesn’t.” The word on the street is wrong, and PHP needs someone to stand up and tell the truth: that it does scale.“

We occasionally have to justify to clients why we choose to develop applications in PHP, so I thought I’d blog about it here.

A recent article on CIO.com slating the PHP programming language for security, scalability and performance has sparked a frenzy in the PHP community prompting lots of comments arguing to the contrary.

The author’s uninformed conclusion is sadly typical of a lot people in the industry, who’ve heard from their mate in the banking world, that if you want secure, high performance scalable web apps, you’ve got to go with Java.
This is simply not the case, and here’s why:

1. A highly skilled development team is much more important than your choice of language. Sloppy programming can cause security issues? This is true of any language.
2. A poorly designed system is, a poorly designed system - regardless of what technologies were selected for implementation. Poor implementation will cause any project to have problems regardless of size. To blame a language for poor decisions or bad practices is just silly.
3. PHP has come a long way, and with the right developer PHP can be as powerful, scalable and reliable as any other language.
4. Yahoo, Facebook, Wikipedia, Technorati, Digg, Flickr, Friendster and countless other extremely high traffic websites are powered by PHP.
5. PHP allows applications to be developed far quicker than Java.

I was catching up on a bit of reading this week when I stumbled across an article that for me gives a prime example of the importance of accessibility. This particular case was focussed on a feature which is referred to in the game as “progressive enhancement”. A recent trend in web development circles has been to implement what many people refer to as web 2.0 features to enhance a user’s experience of a site. In essence it should be about adding bells and whistles to features within your site with the overall aim of improving a user’s experience.

From a developers point of view this is a bit of a double edge sword. We love implementing features using cutting edge techniques but our sensible side always has to think about the “what if” situations. What if the user doesn’t have JavaScript turned on, what if the JavaScript fails to load correctly. We get over this hurdle by using the progressive enhancement technique, this means getting a feature to work without the bells and whistles then adding them in such a way that if they weren’t there the feature would still work. This obviously adds to development time and as developers you often have the feeling of is this worth it? I mean really how often as a percent will the non-enhanced version be used?

Well the answer of course is yes it is worth it and this article sums up to me why it is worth it. This details one customers woes when an enhanced feature went wrong which could have ended up causing him pain. Instead he was able to fall back to the non-enhanced implementation and continued to be a happy customer.