I’m on Holiday at the moment and loving every minute of it! During the Weekend, I’ve decided to add a little something to my blog and installed a new feature which somewhat gives back to those who comment on my blog. I’ve added the Top Commentators feature which lists the top 10 people who have commented on posts within my blog throughout it’s existance. At the moment, I’ve got laserlight with 11 comments.

I came accross laserlight back in the day when I was still trying to find a forum to hang out after work or over the weekend.  I ended up at PHP Builder and had posted a few comments and tried to be part of their community. I think what turned me off PHP Builder was that the members that they had were slightly cliquey and were not as friendly as the ones at SitePoint. At the time, they also had some very big trolls. But that I Imagine would have been in the past.

It would have been great to keep in touch with her, she had some brains about her. Hopefully she’s doing well.

So the way Top Commentators works is that it keeps count of those who comment on my blog posts by using email addresses, does a calculation and then displays the top ten people who have been commenting on the home page and each of the pages on my blog, with a back link to their website.

Hopefully, this will encourage my followers on twitter and the rvdavid my blog log community members to get involved and participate in leaving comments on some of the blog posts that I write.

This is my way of providing a window of appreciation for everyone who contributes to my blog posts. So thank you in advance, and thank you to the regular visitors who keep an eye out for my blog. You guys are great!

Maybe it’s just a routine. So from this point forward, I guess I’m going to retire the “fast 15″ concept and actually just post one post per day and try to fit it inside 15 minutes – I think this is makes sense. It makes the blog’s structure a little less complicated and less gimmicky.

So to conclude, I guess I’m just making a quick announcement to let you all know that the “fast 15″ is now gone and has served as an introduction to a more regular posting schedule.

Nice and quick today – I’m finishing off a double scotch at home as a reward for working so hard during the week and watching “Rich man, poor man on Fox Classics + 2″.

• “well, do I really want to do a post just for the sake of doing a post?”,
• “do I have anything entertaining or informative to share?”,
• “will the trolls come and get me tonight in my sleep?”
• finally, there’s “do I have the time to write a post?”.

See at times like these when I’d almost always say “no” and then leave my blog as is.

New Schedule: Well, that’s about to change!

Since yesterday, I’ve decided to get back into the swing of things. I’ve decided to get active again on twitter and mybloglog and it actually felt good. So I’ve started to rebuild my MBL community membership numbers (we’re up to  12 now from 0) and will be posting regularly with the help of my new blog category I’ve decided to call “15 minutes” ”Daily Recap” ”Recap Daily” ”Fast 15″.

About the new “Fast 15″ Category

Fast 15 is where I do a post on whatever I’ve been thinking about during the day or… at that particular point in time. It may be a recap, may be an opinion, may be just some random BS that I wanted to share or blabber on about while bashing on my keyboard for 15 minutes.

Not sure if it will be interesting, not sure if it will be informative, but it will certainly be genuine, coming from me, raw, from the top of my dome.

I plan on posting a “Fast 15″ post every weekday – maybe even some on weekends too if I’m able. So be sure to check out the site. If you haven’t already, subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter – let’s keep in touch.

The Posts I will be making in the “Classes & Examples” Sub-Category will be formatted in the following way:

• Problem: This is a short description of the problem that the PHP Class or Example will be solving.
• Class Name: The name of the PHP class.
• Responsibilities: The responsibilities of the PHP class.
• Collaborators: This lists the classes that interact with the PHP Class I will be using in the example.
• Code: What good is an example without any code?
• Considerations & Conclusion: This part of the post covers things that should be considered either when developing or using the class or code example.

As you can see, I will be trying to follow a specific format. I have some pretty big plans for this section, I hope you will find it as useful as I intend it to be.

regards.

They’ve screwed up a number of things, but I guess that can be expected. It could have easily been avoided too though – very easily might I add – like sending the correct plans with variations to contractors.

To their credit, they’re fixing things… but I’m shitty that the data network I wanted built into the house has a stupid hick up – two locations share one line. which means that I can only connect either one or the other ethernet port – yes I could go wireless, but that’s not what I paid for. ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

The fucking landscaping is half done. I’ve contacted them about it, the contractor comes does half a garden and never comes back. Where’s my mulch? where’s my fricking shrubs?!?!

Food for thought I guess, I suppose I could liken this to what clients out there who have paid sub par developers to develop their sites. I mean a bug here and a bug there could be overlooked but not missing and half built features or features which the client has paid for do not work as they had laid out in the requirements document. Amateur hour. I’m disappointed but I guess it could be worse, they could have built the house flipped or have bits of SQL within the walls.

Anyway, I’ve _just_ had my ADSL subscription activated at my new residence, so I guess it’s back to business. It’s been fun not working from home for a little, a nice welcome break. Just the break I needed to recharge my semantic batteries and inject new ways of doing things.

DevScripts is basically an online script directory, which needed to be rewritten and needs to be cleaned up badly. Buttloads of Software applications made their way into the listing along with an unsalvagable/unrefactorable code base – yuck!

After taking one look at it – the first thing I noticed was that it used the Smarty Templating engine which was in my opinion, a very poor decision. Smarty sells itself off by putting an unneeded divide between template “designer” and “developer”.

– rant –

Something along the lines of designers being “too dumb” to understand php tags and simple php constructs, so they MIGHT break the application I could see them saying – “why give them the chance to break your app? use our custom templating language! it’s easy to learn. Don’t worry about the overhead, we have a caching system!” — blah blah blah… I could rant on about how Smarty is solving a problem that doesn’t exist or can’t be solved by teaching your template (or web) designer some basic PHP syntax and how even if mistakes were made, would be easy to fix, but I’m straying from my gripe about old devscripts using Smarty.

– end rant –

While Smarty is already in itself a poor choice for a view layer, doing it for a site which is managed by developers was even worse.

Bottom line – we scrapped the old code and Smarty with it.

Doing the requirements document, it did not seem to be too much work however, as we got developin’, DevScripts proved to be quite a bit more than I had expected. We went from “a conversion will only take 6 weeks” to “let’s inject some functionality into this” and so we did. 8 weeks down the track, after waiting for the Server to be set up for about a week and a bit or so, the public beta went up – and it still is up! Check it out at http://www.devscripts.com/

I thought that it was a very smooth landing, however, we did not get the show on the road fast enough – but I guess this will come in time. Next project, I’ll be sure to bring the team’s focus on hauling ass.

So yes, I apologise in advance for being dormant for a few weeks. I have a few half baked posts which I will be working on at times when I need to procrastinate.

Stay tuned.

I’ve also created a new category for my “General Notes”. I’ve noticed that from time to time, I find myself thinking about subject matter that would be good to share, but is not a big enough subject to make a blog post about. So I created this category to serve as a repository for such ideas about small but important subject matter.

These new sub categories can be found under PHP Programming. As a final note, I’d like to add that I’ve moved the PHP Design Patterns category as a sub category to PHP Programming. Please update your feeds.

Regards,

RV David.