Grep My Mind » Web Development

Status 200 != OK?

Michael Tougeron — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:59:03 +0000

When you think about SEO do you remember to think about how your website handles HTTP status codes? The odds are that you don’t. Your “page not found” probably returns a 404 (everyone knows about that one) but what about programmatic error pages or login pages? Search engines index pretty much anything that has a 200 status code. This means if you don’t pay attention you can end up with pages indexed & findable that shouldn’t be.

For example, if you are logged out, Washington Post’s newsletter page 302 redirects you to a login page that then serves a 200. This means a Google search for newsletters for washingtonpost.com gets indexed with the text from the login page. If they were to serve a 401 “Unauthorized” on the pages that require logins, these login pages would not be indexed. Use caution with that scenario though. It might be better to handle search engines differently than normal users so the content can be indexed.

What if sometimes you need to take a feature offline (or even, godz forbid, the entire site) for maintenance/upgrades? I assume you provide some sort of messaging to the users. If that page serves a 200 status and Google happens to try to index during that time you get screwed by having all of that feature’s pages get indexed as a single page. It is better to have the offline message page return a 503 status so the search engine knows that the service is temporarily unavailable and to try again later.

It is becoming more common for sites to capture a 404 and try to do a site search, or similar processing, for a possible match. Frequently when this happens it is handled within the app code rather than having the web server deliver the default 404 page. At GameSpot.com, the programmer who first set this up forgot to serve the 404 status code and was returning a 200. This meant that when a duplicate game was deleted from the database, the links to it were still showing up on Google. Once we made sure the code returned a status of 404 they went away next time Google indexed the site.

Finally, don’t forget about the 400 status code. If you try to load phpBB’s forums with an invalid forum id it will return a 200 status code even though it is not a valid request. This is a good situation to serve a 400 Bad Request. Keep in mind that that you probably wouldn’t want to return a 400 if the forum id just doesn’t exist (e.g., http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewforum.php?f=123456) because it might exist at some point. At the very least, return a 404.

As a side note, with HTTP/1.1 there is a new 307 status code that is very similar to how you’re used to using 302s. It will probably be a few more years before HTTP/1.1 is the default for browsers & the 307 will be truly usable.

How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data – SF MySQL Meetup April 6th, 2009

Michael Tougeron — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 20:40:29 +0000

When: 6:30pm Monday April 6th, 2009
Where: CBS Interactive – 235 2nd Street San Francisco, CA
RSVP: How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data

Join the SF MySQL Meetup for our April meetup where Bret Taylor from FriendFeed talks about how they store their data in a "schema-less" system on top of MySQL. FriendFeed stores over 250 million entries and a bunch of other data, from comments and "likes" to friend lists.

As the database has grown, they have tried to iteratively deal with the scaling issues that come with rapid growth. They did the typical things, like using read slaves and memcache to increase read throughput and sharding our database to improve write throughput. However, as FriendFeed grew, scaling their existing features to accommodate more traffic turned out to be much less of an issue than adding new features.

In particular, making schema changes or adding indexes to a database with more than 10 – 20 million rows completely locks the database for hours at a time. After some deliberation, FriendFeed decided to implement a "schema-less" storage system on top of MySQL rather than use a completely new storage system. This talk attempts to describe the high-level details of the system.

Bret Tayler is one of the founders of FriendFeed.com. Before starting FriendFeed, he was a Group Product Manager at Google, responsible for Google’s developer products. Before that, he launched Google Maps and Google Local, and before that he worked on Google’s crawling and indexing infrastructure.

Agenda:
6:30 – 7:15 — Doors open/general socializing & food provided by Sun Startup Essentials
7:15 – 8:30 — Main presentation by Bret Taylor from FriendFeed
8:30 – 9:00 — Main presentation Q&A
9:00 – 10:00 — General discussion/Q&A/networking/etc.
10:00ish — end of group

Diving into the Yahoo! Open Stack – SF PHP Meetup April 2nd, 2009

Michael Tougeron — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:03:35 +0000

When: 6:30pm Thursday April 2nd, 2009
Where: CBS Interactive – 235 2nd Street San Francisco, CA
RSVP: Diving into the Yahoo! Open Stack

Join the SF PHP Meetup for an exploration into the Yahoo! Open Stack and learn how to leverage Yahoo’s platforms and scalability to build your next application. We will examine the components that make up Yahoo’s open stack: developer tools (YUI), data apis (YQL, BOSS), social apis, and the application platform (YAP).

Overview
- What is the Yahoo! Open Stack?
  - Developer Tools – YUI, Tutorials
  - YOS SDK for PHP
- Data APIs – YQL, BOSS …
- Social APIs – Profiles, Connections, Updates, …
- Application Platform
  - OpenSocial Support
How does it all work?
- Development Workflow
Building an open application with PHP and YOS
Common Problems & Solutions
- CAJA
- OpenSocial

Dustin Whittle is a Technical Yahoo! and Developer Evangelist for Yahoo’s Open Strategy. When he is not evangelizing Yahoo’s Open Stack, he helps develop it through his work on the Yahoo! Developer Network and Yahoo! Application Platform. Prior to his work helping create an open Yahoo!, he has contributed to Yahoo! Answers and Delicious. When not focused on Yahoo!, he is an active open source contributor for the symfony project and is a regular speaker at technical conferences around the world.

Agenda:
6:30 – 7:15 — Doors open/general socializing & food provided by Yahoo!
7:15 – 8:30 — Main presentation by Dustin Whittle on the Yahoo! Open Stack
8:30 – 9:00 — Main presentation Q&A
9:00 – 10:00 — General discussion/Q&A/networking/etc.
10:00ish — end of group

svn pre-commit & post-commit hooks

Michael Tougeron — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 16:47:55 +0000

I have to say I love subversion (svn) hooks. I’ve only been playing around with the concept fairly recently and I’m surprised that I lasted this long without them. I wanted to take a few minutes and share my favorite ways of using them. As well as a few that I don’t use but I think could be pretty helpful.

Before we keep going, if you don’t know what svn hooks are you can read up on them at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch05s02.html. svnbook.red-bean.com is my reference site of choice whenever I need to look up a svn command.

My #1, all-time, greatest in the world, bestest favorite is a svn pre-commit hook to syntax check my PHP code. There is nothing I hate more than a developer checking in code with syntax errors and breaking qa or stage or even, god-forbid, production. It’s as easy as setting up the hook to run a script that calls “/path/to/php -l /path/to/file.php” and on failure reject the commit. This way code that has syntax errors will never make it into SVN. Now if only open-source projects like ZendFramework did something like this before releasing their code. To be fair, the syntax errors are in their documentation not in the /library/ files but that’s still pretty dumb & annoying.

Another nice way to use a post-commit hook is to run something like PHP_CodeSniffer against the commit. CodeSniffer is an awesome PEAR package that scans your file and flags coding standards violations. It comes pre-packaged with sniffers for the PHPCS, PEAR, Squiz and Zend. Set it up to run and if it finds coding standard violations you can have the hook send out nasty little blame messages. This isn’t something that I’d want to run on pre-commit just in case you really need to get something into production NOW. But if I hosted an open source project, I’d consider it.

Having minified JavaScript & CSS has become the standard way of serving JS & CSS. But who really wants to take the time to minify or combine them? Once again, enter svn hooks. One of the developers set this up for GameSpot and it has been working great! Basically it checks the commits against a defined naming standard, file.src.js or file.src.css, and then runs the YUI! Compressor on it and commits in file.min.(js|css). He also made it check a global.conf in the file’s directory so it came mash up smaller js files into a global.min.js so we serve one file instead of ten.

Of course, let’s not forget about what is probably the most common svn hook; the post-commit email hook. I like svnmailer better than mailer.py that comes with svn by default. I think it’s easier to configure/change and to setup rules for how you want the emails to look or where to go.

If you’re using a ticket tracking system like Bugzilla or Trac that doesn’t have its own way of peeking into svn (like JIRA can with this plugin) you can write a post-commit hook to update the ticket when something is committed. You can see how Trac recommends you do it at http://trac.edgewall.org/browser/trunk/contrib/trac-post-commit-hook.

To help you on the way to creating your own svn hooks, tigris has a few hooks that are distributed with svn. They can be quite helpful so you should take a look at them.

Introducing the Tungsten Replicator for MySQL – SF MySQL Meetup Feb 2nd, 2009

Michael Tougeron — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:04:15 +0000

Almost everyone I’ve ever talked to about MySQL has some complaint or another about its replication. So when Robert Hodges, CTO of Continuent, offered to speak about the Tungsten Replicator open source project at the February 2nd SF MySQL meetup I was all for it! Now I know what you are thinking… “Not another sales pitch!” But have no fear, Robert is one hell of a smart guy and is much more of a techie than a CTO (in a good way). I remember one sales call where Robert came to CNET to talk about Continuent’s clustering software and we ended up spending more time talking databases in general than about the product.

So if you’re in the SF area on Monday Feb 2nd, 2009, stop by the CBSi building and listen in.

When: 6:30pm Monday Feb 2nd, 2009
Where: CBSi – 235 2nd Street San Francisco, CA
RSVP: http://mysql.meetup.com/30/calendar/9455586/

Description from the SF MySQL Meetup calendar:

Tungsten Replicator is a new open source project for database replication. It offers MySQL to Oracle replication, robust handling of master failures, extremely flexible topologies, and an extensible architecture that allows you to add your own replication features if you don’t find them there already. I’ll describe why MySQL needs more replication, show the product architecture, describe some of the problems it solves, and demonstrate the replicator in action. Finally, we’ll play “stump the chump” where you can present your replication problem and I’ll describe how our replicator handles it. Whether you have a tricky replication problem or are just curious about the subject, please join us. This is a very technical presentation that should be of interest to all true MySQL fans.

More information on Tungsten Replicator: http://www.continuent.com/community/tungsten-replicator

Validating HTML with tidy

Michael Tougeron — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:41:32 +0000

If you ever have to do HTML validation or parsing in PHP the tidy extension is the way to do it! This extension lets you use the abilities of tidy in some pretty powerful ways. The extension, written by John Coggeshall, has been around for several years now. I can see how if someone just took a quick glance at it they could think it was nice, but not really something they need. How wrong they would be! If you take a few minutes and look under the hood, tidy is an extremely powerful tool. Not only can it format html to standards (what most people use it for), it can also be a powerful parser and validation tool.

When I’m dealing with user inputted data where I want to allow HTML I have two concerns. First, I don’t want to allow XSS (some xml parsers think

” closes the

tag). Second, the user frequently enters invalid html (e.g., doesn’t close the tag). Fortunately tidy can easily deal with both. The second issue is the easiest to solve by running tidy->cleanRepair() on the html. The first is taken care of by looping through the tidy nodes and rebuilding the html using a whitelist. More about how to do this after the break.

To start, you’ll need to setup your tidy options. I tend to use the following options. The word-2000 option is great because it strips out all of the annoying html, css, etc. that Microsoft Word inserts for its formatting.

$config = array(‘indent’ => false,
‘output-xhtml’ => true,
‘wrap’ => 0,
‘fix-uri’ => true,
‘word-2000′ => true,
‘show-body-only’ => true,
‘drop-proprietary-attributes’ => true,
‘ncr’ => false,
‘drop-empty-paras’ => false,
‘hide-endtags’ => true,
‘lower-literals’ => true,
‘markup’ => true,
‘quote-ampersand’ => true,
‘force-output’ => true);

Add/Remove these options as it works best for you. I’ve found that these work best for the cleaning & repairing of accidentally invalid HTML. Read the tidy docs for what each of these mean and how they affect what tidy does. Please note that in the above options I include “force-output” so that I can display back to the user what the results of trying to fix the HTML is so that they can fix their input.

If you’re parsing user generated content, usually they are just entering the tags and HTML for the specific content they want posted. This means you’ll need to wrap that input in the , and tags before processing it through tidy.

// Let’s initialize tidy with our HTML and config options.
$tidy = tidy_parse_string($html, $config);
// Not let’s clean & repair to try and "fix" user errors
$tidy->cleanRepair();
// Start tracking any errors at this point so we can give good feedback to the user
if (tidy_error_count($tidy) && $tidy->errorBuffer ) {
$errors = explode("\n", $tidy->errorBuffer);
foreach ( $errors as $key => $error ) {
$errors[$key] = htmlentities($error);
}
}
// Once tidy has cleaned & repaired the initial user input
// we need to loop through the object and validate each
// HTML tag block. We will only need to do that though if
// the $body actually has child tags
$body = $tidy->body();
if ( $body->child ) {
// we need to validate each HTML tag in the
// validateTidyNode() will be called recursively for
// any sub-tag blocks
foreach ( $body->child as $key => $child ) {
$error = validateTidyNode($child, $new_html);
$body->child[$key] = $child;
// And of course track the errors as they
// appear to give good feedback to the user
if ( $error ) {
$errors = array_merge((array)$errors, (array)$error);
}
}
}
return array(‘html’ => $new_html, ‘errors’ => $errors);
function validateTidyNode(&$tidy_node, &$html, $allowed_tags) {
$bad_tag = false;
// If the node is text, just add the text to the HTML
if ( $tidy_node->type == TIDY_NODETYPE_TEXT ) {
$html .= $tidy_node->value;
return;
}
// If the node does not exist in your array of acceptable HTML tags
// then track and error message and set the $bad_tag flag.
elseif ( !array_key_exists(strtolower($tidy_node->name), $allowed_tags) ) {
$errors[] = ‘Tag: ‘ . $tidy_node->name . ‘ is not allowed and has been removed.’;
$bad_tag = true;
}
if ( $tidy_node->child ) {
$html2 = ”;
foreach ( $tidy_node->child as $key => $child ) {
$error = validateTidyNode($child, $html2);
$tidy_node->child[$key] = $child;
if ( $error ) {
$errors = array_merge((array)$errors, (array)$error);
}
}
}
if ( $bad_tag ) {
// I prefer to "display" the bad HTML tags so that the
// user can see that it was not accepted. But you
// may prefer to just strip the tag.
// $html .= ‘ ‘;
$html .= ‘<’ . $tidy_node->name;
}
else {
$html .= ‘<’ . $tidy_node->name;
if ( $tidy_node->attribute ) {
unset($found_attribs);
foreach ( $tidy_node->attribute as $attrib_name => $attrib_value ) {
// verify that the tag is allowed to have the specified attribute.
if ( !array_key_exists(strtolower($attrib_name), $allowed_tags[$tidy_node->name][‘attribs’]) ) {
$errors[] = ‘Tag ‘ . $tidy_node->name . ‘ is not allowed to have the attribute ‘ . $attrib_name . ‘ and has been removed.’;
unset($tidy_node->attribute[$attrib_name]);
}
else {
// validate the attribute’s value. We don’t want invalid values.
$res = validateHTMLTagAttribute($tidy_node->name, $attrib_name, $attrib_value, $allowed_tags[$tidy_node->name]);
if ( !$res[‘remove’] ) {
$html .= ‘ ‘ . $res[‘attrib_name’] . ‘="’ . $res[‘attrib_value’] . ‘"’;
}
if ( $res[‘errors’] ) {
$errors[] = $res[‘errors’];
}
}
if ( trim($attrib_name) ) {
$found_attribs[] = $attrib_name;
}
}
}
// check to make sure that required attributes are set. e.g. needs to have the src attribute
if ( $allowed_tags[$tidy_node->name][‘attribs’] ) {
foreach ( $allowed_tags[$tidy_node->name][‘attribs’] as $attrib_name => $attrib_settings ) {
if ( $attrib_settings[‘required’] && (!$found_attribs || !in_array($attrib_name, $found_attribs)) ) {
$errors[] = ‘Tag ‘ . $tidy_node->name . ‘ is required to have the attribute ‘ . $attrib_name . ‘.’;
}
}
}
// some tags require at least one of a set of attributes. e.g. needs to have either the href or name attribute.

if ( $allowed_tags[$tidy_node->name][‘required_attribs’] ) {

$attrib_found = false;

if ( $found_attribs ) {

foreach ( $allowed_tags[$tidy_node->name][‘required_attribs’] as $attrib_name ) {

if ( in_array($attrib_name, $found_attribs) ) {
$attrib_found = true;
}
}
}
if ( !$attrib_found ) {
$errors[] = ‘Tag ‘ . $tidy_node->name . ‘ is required to have one of the following attributes: ‘ . implode(‘, ‘, $allowed_tags[$tidy_node->name][‘required_attribs’]) . ‘.’;
}
}
}
if ( isset($allowed_tags[$tidy_node->name][‘settings’]) && !$allowed_tags[$tidy_node->name][‘settings’][‘require_close’] ) {
$html .= ‘ /’;
}
if ( $bad_tag ) {
// $html .= ‘ ‘;
$html .= ‘>’;
}
else {
$html .= ‘>’;
}
$html .= $html2;
if ( $bad_tag || $allowed_tags[$tidy_node->name][‘settings’][‘require_close’] ) {
if ( $bad_tag ) {
$html .= ‘</’ . $tidy_node->name . ‘>’;
}
else {
$html .= ‘ . $tidy_node->name . ‘>’;
}
}
return $errors;
}
function validateHTMLTagAttribute( $tag_name, $attrib_name, $attrib_value, $tag_data ) {
// set to the unmodified version first. if modified, it will change at the end of the method.
$res[‘attrib_name’] = $attrib_name;
$res[‘attrib_value’] = $attrib_value;
if ( !$tag_data) {
$res[errors] = "$tag_name could not be found. Invalid tag/attribute.";
return $res;
}
if ( $tag_data[‘attribs’][‘unlimited_attribs’] ) {
$res[‘valid’] = true;
return $res;
}
$attrib = $tag_data[‘attribs’][$attrib_name];
switch ( $attrib[‘type’] ) {
// no restrictions on the value of the attributes (not normally recommended)
case ‘unrestricted’:
break;
// the attribute can only have one of the defined values
case ‘fixed’:
if ( !in_array(strtolower($attrib_value), $attrib[‘values’]) ) {
$res[‘errors’] = "$attrib_name is not set to an accepted value for $tag_name tag.";
return $res;
}
break;
// some basic numeric checks
case ‘numeric’:
case ‘px’:
case ‘percent’:
$attrib_value = intval($attrib_value);
if ( $attrib_value > $attrib[‘max’] ) {
$res[‘errors’] = "$attrib_name is greater than the max value (" . $attrib[‘max’] . ") allowed for $tag_name tag.";
return $res;
}
elseif ( $attrib_value < $attrib[‘min’] ) {
$res[‘errors’] = "$attrib_name is less than the max value (" . $attrib[‘min’] . ") allowed for $tag_name tag.";
return $res;
}
if ( $attrib[‘type’] == ‘percent’ ) {
$attrib_value = $attrib_value . "%";
}
elseif ( $attrib[‘type’] == ‘px’ ) {
$attrib_value = $attrib_value . "px";
}
break;
case ‘hex’:
// 6 characters of A-F and 0-9
// optionally allow a # in front for a total
// of 7 characters
break;
case ‘url’:
// validate according to your valid URL criteria
// e.g., only allow for current domain or if the
// tag is "img" make sure the extension is .jpg or .gif
break;
case ‘string’:
// validate for a string. I usually consider _-. and similar
// characters acceptable for a "string" even though they are
// not truly a string
break;
default:
$res[‘errors’] = "ERROR! Do not know how to process the tag $tag_name!";
break;
}
$res[‘attrib_name’] = $attrib_name;
$res[‘attrib_value’] = $attrib_value;
$res[‘valid’] = true;
return $res;
}

So how you setup the array for tag validation is pretty much up to you. The format I used looks a lot like this:

$tags = array(
‘a’ => array( ‘settings’ => array(‘require_close’ => true),
‘attribs’ => array( ‘href’ => array(‘type’ => ‘url’),
‘name’ => array(‘type’ => ‘string’),
‘id’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘string’,
‘auth_level’ => AUTH_LEVEL_TRUSTED_USER
),
‘class’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘unrestricted’,
‘auth_level’ => AUTH_LEVEL_TRUSTED_USER
),
‘onclick’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘unrestricted’,
‘auth_level’ => AUTH_LEVEL_TRUSTED_USER
),
‘onmouseover’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘unrestricted’,
‘auth_level’ => AUTH_LEVEL_TRUSTED_USER
)
),
‘required_attribs’ => array( ‘href’, ‘name’ )
),
‘b’ => array(‘settings’ => array( ‘require_close’ => true)),
‘img’ => array( ‘settings’ => array( ‘require_close’ => false),
‘attribs’ => array( ‘src’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘url’,
‘required’ => true
),
‘alt’ => array(‘type’ => ‘string’),
‘border’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘numeric’,
‘min’ => 0,
‘max’ => 5
),
‘align’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘fixed’,
‘values’ => array( ‘center’,
‘left’,
‘right’
)
),
‘height’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘numeric’,
‘min’ => 1,
‘max’ => 2048
),
‘width’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘numeric’,
‘min’ => 1,
‘max’ => 2048
),
‘title’ => array(‘type’=>‘string’),
‘hspace’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘numeric’,
‘min’ => 0,
‘max’ => 10
),
‘vspace’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘numeric’,
‘min’ => 0,
‘max’ => 10
),
‘id’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘string’,
‘auth_level’ => AUTH_LEVEL_TRUSTED_USER
),
‘class’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘unrestricted’,
‘auth_level’ => AUTH_LEVEL_TRUSTED_USER
),
‘onclick’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘unrestricted’,
‘auth_level’ => AUTH_LEVEL_TRUSTED_USER
),
‘onmouseover’ => array( ‘type’ => ‘unrestricted’,
‘auth_level’ => AUTH_LEVEL_TRUSTED_USER
)
)
),
);

The auth_level is a filter that I have in place to only allow users with a certain amount of access, such as internal staff, to use that attribute. As you probably already know, attributes like onmouseover are an easy gateway to XSS exploits. As you add new elements to the tag rule definition you just need to update the validate function in order to validate against it.

You may have noticed that I’m using the deprecated HTML attributes instead of putting all of this in a “style” attribute. I’ve found that most users don’t know CSS styles and are familiar with the old-style HTML attributes. If you force your users to use styles you’ll have whole other validation routine to ensure exploits are not in the CSS.

Note: Please don’t just copy/paste this code into your code and use it. I’m quite positive there are bugs and typos all throughout. Oh, and no, this is not the code used by the sites I work on. It is similar but definitely not the same.

Scaling MySQL powered Web Sites by Sharding and Replication – SF MySQL Meetup Nov 2008

Michael Tougeron — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:28:45 +0000

Peter Zaitsev will be giving his excellent presentation “Scaling MySQL powered Web Sites by Sharding and Replication” to the upcoming SF MySQL 6:00pm on November 3rd @ the CBS Interactive (formerly CNET Networks) building in SOMA San Francisco (235 2nd St).

RSVP here: http://mysql.meetup.com/30/calendar/8912109/

Description from the 2008 Velocity conference:
When your application grows beyond capacity of a single MySQL server there are few ways to scale, with most typical being Replication and Sharding.

In this presentation you will learn how, depending on your application performance scalability and high availability goals, you can choose what proper scaling strategy will be good for you.

We also will speak about scalability limitations of replication of Replication and Sharding, implementation complexities, and aspects of operation.

Peter Zaitsev’s bio:
MySQL Performance Blog

Peter helped many companies ranging from one man startups to Fortune 500 companies with their Performance and Scaling problems on various stages starting from architecture design and down to queries and schema optimization.

Over cause of the years Peter has spoken on many International conferences focused on MySQL, Open Source, Databases or High Performance Web applications.

Before co-founding Percona Peter worked for MySQL AB as head of High Performance Group being involved in Support, Consulting, Development and working with vendors helping to optimize their software or hardware to perform well with MySQL.

Peter also was involved in number of Web Startups in the roles ranging from CTO to Consultant and has a lot of experience in MySQL and Web Applications Operations, Deployment, Quality Assurance and Development.
Please join us!

Map to CNET Networks, Inc.
When you arrive, please look for the PHP/MySQL Meetup sign pointing you to the conference room.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Making frameworks suck less – SF PHP Meetup Nov 2008

Michael Tougeron — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:58:35 +0000

Terry Chay will be returning to speak again! Due to popular demand Terry has agreed to give his recent “Making frameworks suck less” talk that he gave to the ZendCon08 UnCon this year. Be sure to wear comfortable shoes ’cause Terry will pack the room!

RSVP here: http://php.meetup.com/139/calendar/8911737/

The blurb from ZendCon08:
Terry Chay, the original PHP Terrorist, is well known for his criticism and ridicule of the Ruby on Rails framework. He criticizes, mocks, and f-bombs his enemies into surrender. In this discussion, Terry will share his ideas and thoughts on making frameworks better.

Map to CNET Networks, Inc.
When you arrive, please look for the PHP Meetup sign pointing you to the conference room. Please RSVP if you are attending so that I can prepare enough snacks and beverages.

Look forward to seeing you there!

This event can be found at:
http://php.meetup.com/139/calendar/8911737/
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39294579201
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1195581/

Aug PHP Meetup was a success!

Michael Tougeron — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 18:47:47 +0000

Last Thursday’s SF PHP Meetup had a pretty good turnout; about 70 people by my count. Joe Stump from Digg.com gave his talk titled “Deploying code with PEAR” to the group. Thanks to Ray and Roger from zynga.com who contributed pizza & sodas for an opportunity to tell the developers about the job opportunities at zynga. Digg.com & GameSpot.com are both hiring (Digg and GameSpot) as well. Mariano Peterson and I both took pictures and posted them on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/marianopeterson/sets/72157606611446280/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaeltougeron/sets/72157606635039807/ respectively.

I already have next month’s talk/speaker lined up. Aaron Newton from Iminta.com (formerly CNET) will be giving us a preview of his Mootools talk titled “Mootools: An Overview” that he has planned for the upcoming AJAX Experience conference. Aaron has a Mootools book coming out that’s available now via pre-order on Amazon.

SF PHP Meetup July 2008 – PHP::$unicode->i18n()

Michael Tougeron — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:15:14 +0000

Kudos to Mariano for taking the lead while I’m out on paternity leave (I’m going to write about that ones of these days) and setting up July’s PHP Meetup. Thanks to an introduction from Terry, Mariano asked Andrei Zmievski to talk about the unicode updates to PHP 6. Due to the 4th of July, we’ve moved the meetup from it’s normal date/time to Thursday July 10th @ 7pm. It is still at CNET like usual (thanks to GameSpot.com funding the meetup).

Title: PHP::$unicode->i18n()

Description:
PHP 6 brings fully functional and mature Unicode support to the Web world. This talk will cover all the layers of the PHP (bread)/Unicode (butter)/i18n (jam) sandwich. Come and find out how to work with locales, use collation to compare and sort strings, and format numbers, currencies, and dates for any country in the world. Bring your appetite because the toasty goodness is waiting.

When: Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 7pm
Where: CNET Networks: 235 2nd St, San Francisco, CA 94518

You can RSVP on the SF PHP Meetup’s site or just show up. I always like it when people RSVP so that I know how much food to buy. But it isn’t a prereq or anything.

EDIT: I just saw that Terry mentioned PB&J and I like the idea. So PB&J it is; plus the usual chips, sodas, candy, etc. of course.