There are countless articles, forums, blogs and other sites that try to either defend or blast PHP for use as a professional language for web development. There are a ton of PHP developers than ever before and there are many great options to choose from in terms of your web development technology.

A good example of these debates are like this one — which I will warn that you not read too much into as well!

Considering PHP is dominant due to it’s default installation with Apache on Linux web servers – the most dominant server distro on the web — this debate could greatly be ‘closed’ if these folks look through a magnifying glass for specific scenarios, or if they look to people that have worked on both sides of the debate — such as me.
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So one day after I launched my new blog redesign and write the official post to go along with it I saw a nearly doubling of my site traffic the next day(s).

Whether you’re selling a product, service or a business web application or your a freelancer with a blog, it doesn’t matter. Setting up your site and forgetting about it will make your website time and money investment, worthless.
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Ok so some of you may have noticed I redesigned my blog today.

Well I’d been seeing a bit of traffic increases through Google Analytics and just got time to work on updating the blog theme and most importantly start posting frequently. I thought I should take my own medicine that I give clients and get my blog and social media activities rolling again. It’s been a busy few months since I last posted about job and gig hunting and I needed an update!
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After talking to my friends Robert La Gesse from Rackspace Cloud and @vidluther from ThirdPartyCode, I decided messing with domain alias feature of Rackspace Cloud Sites so I could save money from getting a Cloud Server, VPS or slicehost.

If you need to run multiple-separate domains and one base master WordPress template theme with multiple children themes (like what I needed was a product site, 2 blogs, a community and a corporate site) without the need for wildcard subdomains or subfolders per blog/site then running a single instance of code and database on Rackspace Cloud Sites is possible using their domain alias feature.
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I often run into this problem since I bought a Apple Macbook Pro when using Time Machine to safeguard my hard drive through a full backup.

I noticed that it would take hours, sometime never finishing if I just try to delete the folder through Finder on the Time Machine drive.
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I just had to post this on my blog. I’ve been heavily involved with geo-spatial applications lately and mapping interfaces for our upcoming product, VolunteerACT and found this Google App Engine / Google Maps API mashup very compelling.

Make History with the National September 11th Memorial & Museum

For those of you folks who are considering a cloud hosting solution for your ASP.NET web apps with or without WCF services, I strongly recommend you test out Rackspace Cloud.

I had some trouble getting things working but found an excellent article that should help you .NET developers looking to use Rackspace Cloud Sites as solution to host your ASP.NET web sites, web apps or WCF services.

Since cloud hosting has different conditions for security and reliability, there are some other considerations that you should check out at the Help support area of the Rackspace Cloud:

• Overview of modified Medium Trust
• How do I add impersonation to my ASP.NET site?

Cheers to the folks at Rackspace Cloud! PS When can I expect Cloud Servers to run Windows in a vm ?

For those of us wishing the iPhone included GPS receiver built in, this is a short term solution that’s a hack at best but even if it is ‘off’ by 100 yards, I can at least avoid the time wastage that occurs with putting a starting address into the driving directions feature of the iPhone Google Maps application!

Find out more from Gizmodo.

A good friend of mine, Vid Luther from PHPCult / Linuxpowered.com, showed me Selenium, a nifty Firefox extension, today for developing test cases that you can play back into the Firefox browser including pauses, delays, keystrokes, form values, and link clicks.

Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.

If you find yourself repeatedly running the same user flow tests on a website or web application, try out this extension today!

Have you ever been into a meeting with a presentation being shown by some techie or project lead that attempts to describe some kind of trend or probabilistic projection and been bored by the visualization? Well many sectors of the economy rely on very simple visualization tools that aren’t at the fore front of data visualization and mining techniques that are available nowadays.

In the recent past I’ve posted about Google Maps mashups with heat map technology but there are many powerful tools out there (some web based, others not) that intrinsically yield powerful trends that may not even have been discoverable with simple charts, graphs and basic visualization tools of the past era.

An article in SmashingMagazine.com has catalogued and captured screenshots of the most amazing and beautiful data visualization models out there including everything from 3d heatmapping/contouring, content clouding, to mind mapping.

One of my favorites is a 3d visual population hill/spike density map from Time Magazine:

If you are in the business of analysis of any kind, you should definitely read this article and check out the screen shots. You might find the technologies that these companies are creating useful to your endeavor.