A couple of days behind with this one, but I thought I’d post to help out. As alot of the PHP community have mentioned, The PHP London user group are running the UK’s second dedicated PHP conference on Friday, 23rd February. Confirmed speakers thus far are, Cal Evans, Simon Laws, Kevlin Henney and Rasmus Lerdorf.
I didn’t make it last year but will see what I can sort out this year.
After reading this news article, (funnily enough through my RSS feed of digg.com’s programming section) I decided to sign up for a month to see what Elance.com was like.
Basically Elance is a community to bring together people who want to do work and people need work doing. People or companies post projects in the various categories and then service providers must make proposals, the most impressive being likely to get the contract. Posting projects is free and the charges are made to the people providing the work at a rate of 8.75%.
This seems quite costly for the freelancers, expecially seeing as you have to pay to subscribe as well, but as a trial I’ll try and complete projects at cost and not make a profit.
Just a quick note, I’ve recently moved from Gentoo to Ubuntu on my desktop machine at home. I had a few problems with my Gentoo install and while I find Gentoo great for learning the ins and outs of things, as I do more and more freelance work, I need a OS environment that’s not going to let me down. My point being environment, Gentoo is more than capable of being extremely stable, but it takes a lot more knowledge to get it and keep it stable. Whilst I was happy learning and taking my time before, things need to happen a little more urgently now.
I chose Ubuntu mainly because I run Debian on my dedicated servers and am already familiar with the package management, but also because I wanted to see what the fuss is a bout. I’m very pleased so far. I’m running Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, GNUCash, OpenOffice.org, Amarok and KTorrent day to day, the latter two despite using GNOME for my desktop.
I have a few projects that are in the pipeline, some are at the design stage, some are just notes written in my ‘ideas’ pad, thought I’d share a few.
This is a project I started about 4 years ago for a friend, at one stage I got a fairly decent design done and was just waiting on a bit of content, but that got lost along with the design for the ATST Solutions site after a hard drive failure and a lack of backup. I’ve got a very basic design going, needs some flair.
I decided to start these two as little niche book review sites. I read a lot of Star Wars books and a few PHP books and figured I could write my own reviews, use amazon’s web services to get other peoples views and attempt to make money through the affiliate links. I decided to do this seeing as one of the most popular posts on this blog is the Essential PHP Security Book Review.
I have a few ideas aimed around creating a price comparison site, starting small but hopefully getting big. I plan on using product feeds from the various affiliate networks and have a rather cunning marketing plan, not one that hasn’t been done before, but I don’t think anybody has done it in this area before. I’ve got a couple of thoughts on the name, one of which is treading a little too closely on PriceRunner, but I’m in no rush with this one.
I’m sorry to say it but I’ve started to cave in and use Google’s range of web applications to deal with day to day tasks. It all started when I finally made myself start using a calendar and I figured Google Calendar would be the best place to start. Since then I’ve started using the Alerts service, sending emails to the GMail account I’ve had for ages but never used and now I’ve even switched from Bloglines to Google Reader. I’ve also been using Google Analytics to track statistics on the DaveProxy site.
The following is a little review of each application, what I like and what I don’t.
Google Calendar is a shared calendar application, allowing users to manage their personal calendar and publish parts they would like to, to colleagues and friends. There are also other shared calendars, for example I have Barnsley’s fixtures showing in my calendar. I’ve no complaints to make about the calendar application, it’s nice and easy to use and it sends me SMS reminders, all free of charge.
Whilst I haven’t used the Alerts service all that much, I think it’s an awesome tool. It’s extremely easy tool to use, I was quite suprised to see my Boss using it, receiving alerts based on our company name. Basically you register keywords with the alerts service and tell it how often you want emailing. If any new pages turn up in the google index within that timeframe, you’ll receive an email with a link to that page. Simple.
Again, I’ve not used gmail too much, right now I only receive my google alerts to my gmail address, but as far as webmail goes it’s pretty good. I’d definitely like to see the ability to drag and drop like a RoundCube installation can, but otherwise it’s more than what I need.
I’ve been using Google Reader to read and manage all my RSS feeds for about a week now after switching over from Bloglines and I have mixed feelings. Importing my feeds was easy enough, thanks partially to Bloglines being nice enough to allow me to export them. Google reader by default marks feed entries as read when you scroll past them, which seems pretty cool but two things annoy me. The first is probably a browser issue, but whenever an entry is marked as read, the number in brackets next to the feed or category link on the left changes, as it should, but this causes some of my category links to span two lines, then one line, then two lines again. It’s basically a little flicker on the left hand side of the screen which is a little distracting. The second thing is, if there’s only one entry in a feed or category that is less than the windows height in length, I don’t scroll, so it doesn’t get marked as read. Other than that, it could do with being a little faster, but I’m sure it’ll be constantly improving on that front.
I’m very impressed with the analytics service, it makes it very easy for me to monitor the proxy website, which AWStats isn’t really appropriate, definitely worth checking out.
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Dave Marshall is a Web Developer living in Hull, England. He works on various personal projects and is the Development Manager at C Spencer Ltd, a multi-discipline engineering contractor.
