This Week’s Link List (January 7, 2011)

My first link list of 2001 picks up where 2010 left off – probably too long, but there was too much good stuff to overlook. Highlights include information about the release of Drupal 7, report and resolution of an interesting PHP bug, a look back PHP in 2010, and an intriguing job possibility at Microsoft…

• Scaling up vs. scaling out: http://www.31a2ba2a-b718-11dc-8314-0800200c9a66.com/2010/12/scale-out-your-sql-azure-databasenot.html

• Rob Allen shares a WordPress extension that leverages MagpieRSS: http://akrabat.com/php/displaying-an-rss-feed-in-wordpress/

• The Symfony Live conference schedules for San Francisco and Paris are now available: http://www.symfony-project.org/blog/2011/01/04/symfony-live-conferences-schedule

• Jason Gilmore shows how to use Xdebug and KCacheGrind to begin profiling and analyzing PHP-driven web applications: http://phpbuilder.com/columns/profiling-Xdebug-KCacheGrind/Jason_Gilmore12302010.php3

• Another article by Jason Gilmore, this time examining how to run PHP scripts from the command line: http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/command-line-script/Jason_Gilmore01042011.php3

• Dries Buytaert announces the release of Drupal 7.0! http://buytaert.net/drupal-7.0-released

• What's new in Drupal 7? (SQL Server support and LOTS more!): http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2011/01/06/drupal-7-new-release/

• Rick Regan reports a very strange bug in PHP that has received lots of attention this week: http://www.exploringbinary.com/php-hangs-on-numeric-value-2-2250738585072011e-308/

• Further detail on the bug mentioned above...and a fix! http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9203401/PHP_floating_point_bug_crashes_servers

• I am probably the last person on earth to discover this XHTML validator by the W3C: http://validator.w3.org/

• Like writing, have some LAMP experience, and interested in working at Microsoft? Check out this job posting: https://careers.microsoft.com/JobDetails.aspx?jid=32966&lang=en

• Would your project survive if someone working on it got hit by a bus? http://devzone.zend.com/article/12906-What-is-your-projects-Bus-Factor

• Get an intro to PHP, REST APIs, JSON, regular expressions, and OO programming while building your own Twitter widget (part 1): http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2011/01/05/create-your-own-twitter-widget-1/

• Tony Lukasavage describes how he reached his "recent state of enlightenment and PHP debugging bliss" using WAMP, Xdebug, IntelliJ, and magic: http://savagelook.com/blog/portfolio/php-debugging-on-intellij-idea-10-with-xdebug

• Two ~5 minute videos show you how to install Joomla 1.6 on SQL Server and SQL Azure: http://php.dzone.com/articles/installing-joomla-sql-server

• At last night's PHP meet up in Seattle, we discussed cool UML tools. Here are some of the recommendations:
  • http://plantuml.sourceforge.net/index.html
  • http://staruml.sourceforge.net/en/
  • http://argouml.tigris.org/

• PHP 2010 - year in review (noted is Microsoft's continued positive involvement in PHP communities): http://www.ibuildings.co.uk/blog/archives/1604-PHP-in-2010-a-year-in-retrospective.html

• Mathew Weier O'Phinney show how to make Zend Server available via SSL only: http://weierophinney.net/matthew/archives/252-Making-Zend-Server-Available-Via-SSL-Only.html

• Kevin Schroeder takes a quick look at the benefits of pre-caching: http://www.eschrade.com/page/precaching-4d25dc90

• Ever wonder what an Azure worker role was and how you could leverage one? This explains: http://azurephp.interoperabilitybridges.com/articles/tutorial-using-worker-roles-for-simple-background-processing

Have a great weekend.

-Brian

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