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.

My web projects across businesses, non-profits & government are currently using both .NET and PHP in various ways. I personally love open source technology especially PHP, MySQL, Apache and I contribute to open source projects like GeoMashup, a plugin for WordPress that among other projects. We also use a bit of Java when there is a simple way to integrate it through say web services and if we have expertise to work with it.

What I’ve learned from other experts and from my own experience over the years that technology is a commodity and the experts that are fluent in different technologies, may feel that they are better at PHP than Perl, or better at PHP then Java etc. So it’s sort of biased to say that one technology is better. Facebook, Yahoo and other big internet businesses are using PHP and are doing it well. PHP is not as ‘fast’ as C/C++, Java, .NET or any compiled language but unless you’re a web developer or software architect, you don’t need compiled languages for your website. You need compiled code for back end stuff a lot of the times and Perl can be compiled.

If you can still continue reading this article and aren’t bored out of your mind (to those reader’s that are not techies), you’ll realize that having these argument’s may be pointless.

When I build web application or website prototypes, I almost immediately go to PHP because of good frameworks or platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Symfony and others because I have an infinite amount of functionality and customization options as well as pretty cheap hosting solutions already where PHP/MySQL cost me a lot less than running say Microsoft SQL Server. I also use my Mac Book Pro most of the time I’m in my lab where I build and deploy many sites from my local XAMPP stack that gives me a web development stack that includes Apache, PHP, MySQL etc. When I need to work on .NET I fire up a virtual machine, Remote Desktop into a Windows box or use Mono – the open source .NET Runtime for Linux. But I can even be disconnected from the web and go to the coffee shop and continue developing.

Focusing on specific needs and the ‘right tool for the job’ are probably more realistic so I think developers and technology folks shouldn’t waste time with the “versus” debate. What matters most is what your folks are good at, documentation, having a pool of resources in case you need to grow (PHP has a lot!), whether or not you plan to integrate something that uses a certain technology, licensing concerns (Windows is not free), operating or hosting costs, scalability, and possibly acquisition concerns if you’re planning to sell your business.

Also I should note that if you have an existing investment then there a lot of CTOs and decision makers in organizations do not want to consider adding PHP into the mix even for certain things, like intranet, collaboration, content management due to their reliance on Microsoft. I just advise those folks to stick with their vendor-lock if they don’t understand open source’s benefits since they already have invested too much say in a pure-Microsoft environment including Exchange, Sharepoint etc.

I look forward to seeing what other great applications, frameworks, solutions and products come out but I can bet that these debates will always be alive. New technology from HTML5, CSS3 and more what will continue to push (new and old) developer’s into learning new technology both to build their resume and continue to scratch their learning itch!

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.

The first step is get into the habit of checking your site performance as well as where your visitors come from (urls) and how they found you (search keywords) as you become seasoned with site reporting tools like Google Analytics, which is free!

Also I have yet to find out if my blog is sticky. A traffic spike is good but if no one comes back, then I’ve gotta change gears. I suspect my site may not be sticky enough because people may find that I rant about too many categories (scroll the sidebar).

After checking my stats through convenient MailChimp’s Analytics360 dashboard plugin for my WordPress administration interface I thought I’d write this post to show you the results of my redesign + first post!

If you aren’t getting the results you want out of your site traffic, there are many things you can do from buying online ads (SEM or PPC), to optimizing your content and in-bound links (SEO) but social media is also a no-brainer. My integration with Twitter has helped me drive some traffic and I’ve even seen a few Facebook Likes and shares, but we’ll save site traffic building for another post!

Lastly, the chart above is also motivating one for me as well. Believe it or not with all my years of experience leveraging the internet, building and growing much larger high-traffic sites, I still feel good that people are coming to my blog. I still have a lot more work to do content-wise before I’m happy with my blog’s traffic but little wins and lessons learned are good and keep my momentum going!

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!

As I’m about to do with this blog redesign, I’m trying to ‘speak up and clearly’ so I can measure if people are interested in what I’m saying. In building many websites over the years it’s clear that any type of website redesign may not be the ideal result on the first launch.

First of all, I had been given feedback and tips to consider simplifying and focusing what I do well. I also felt a disconnect with what I’ve been doing on Twitter and this blog since I couldn’t find time for posting to my blog. I’ve been wanting to connect my real-time updates with my blog.

Secondly, I was using an outdated version of WordPress which is not smart.

But before I did anything technical, I thought about why I want to keep this blog going and how I could make it easy on myself to do so. Since I got tips about this I then moved to establish both my Twitter brand and my own brand something I often suggest to clients — don’t just integrate your blog and Twitter, figure out what you want the audience to understand of you by listening to them and being more clear. A website redesign should make it easier for your blog or business to grow. Just make sure you measure it and keep it growing

My hope is to provide useful tips and insights and to share interesting stuff to provoke discussion or further sharing!

Having been a contractor & consultant for many years and knowing many freelancers and other folks just looking for work I figured it might be beneficial for me to share my bookmarks and tips on job hunting in general. Since the recession of 2009 and with 10% unemployment at the time of this post, people need all the opportunities and tips they can get. Although I haven’t had a job in 7 years, there are many times I’ve been asked by friends and colleagues about how to find a job or gig.

There are many sites out there that I probably haven’t covered but here are some:

• simpyhired.com
• www.jobfox.com
• www.theladders.com
• www.jobsradar.com
• www.indeed.com
• jobs.jsninja.com
• job-hunt.com
• www.authenticjobs.com
• careers.com
• careers.yahoo.com
• hotjobs.com
• usajobs.gov
• jobs.37signals.com/jobs
• monster.com
• careerbuilder.com
• dice.com
• craigslist.com

Freelance or Gig Sites

• elance.com
• www.odesk.com

More Job Sites and articles that you may find of use.

• The Top 50 Job Hunting Sites for Job-Seekers, 1-10
• Recession Job Hunting Tips
• ZipRecruiter – Post your job to many sites!

• Get your friends or colleagues and professional recruiters to tell you what they would recommend changing on your resume, cover letters or your job seeking in general
• I recommend you use Google Reader and subscribe to RSS feeds if available from sites that provide RSS especially if the RSS is broken down by category.
• Create some canned cover letters ready to attach to your resume for any job that requires you to submit a letter.
• Try to focus your job search to jobs that you are highly suited to and that are using the right keywords that head hunters or recruiters are looking for.
• If you are seeking a technical position, more than one page is acceptable (many people think that anything more than one page is too much) so try to condense your most recent 5-years of job experience history to 2 pages total..
• Some of the sites above allow you to set search agents and multiple resumes.
• Some of the sites above are not meant for every type of job.
• Consider volunteering your time to a non-profit that may need volunteer help.

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.

I recommend you follow these steps to setup WordPress MU:

1. Download and install WPMU Multi-Site Plugin
2. Setup your different domains, sites blogs locally with the help of this plugin on your dev installation and get everything working the way you want like content, themes, plugins etc.
3. Deploy to the core or ‘first’ site as you would normally do to the Rackspace Cloud Site
4. Test to see if this core site is working

Then follow these steps to setup the other Rackspace Cloud Sites & DNS:

1. Setup the actual core domain in DNS to point to the matching Cloud Site IP that should have an appropriate database for the instance
2. Deploy the local developer instance files and database to this core domain
3. Setup domain aliases with the help of this Help guide at Rackspace Cloud support
4. Test that wordpress mu is serving the core and new alias domains that you have set up in the multi-site configuration

It’s that easy and I was pleasantly surprised when it was working so easily in addition to not having to get a server or other dedicated vm/box for running WPMU in this way!

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.

Instead, I found a command line solution.. but be warned don’t do this unless you know what you are doing!

Steps:

1. Open Terminal
2. Run

   sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/ -d

   – this simply disables ACL on this volume

3. Run

   sudo find . -maxdepth 1 -ctime +1 -exec rm -rfv {} \;

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 ?

With the upcoming release of Ableton Live 7, I wanted to give all my fellow Ableton-hungry producers some of the resources that I’ve found to be useful with regards to VSTs and Ableton 6′s instruments and Live Packs.

Must have Live Packs (Free or cheap!)

• Ableton Live Packs Downloads
• The Covert Operators
• Free Ableton Live Pack by Composer Dennis DeSantis
• Five Dollar Bass, Atmosphere Expansion Packs for Ableton Live
  If you’re finding massive soundware libraries to be a little overwhelming — on your hard drive, your brain, and your wallet — you’ll like the idea of the new expansion packs from Tone Research. The first two are 13MB downloads priced at US$4.99 each. They work with Live 5 and get bonus features from Live 6. I’m still waiting on my copies, so I can’t yet comment on sound quality yet, but I’ll report back once I’ve thrown these into some songs.
• Ableton » Synthtopia
• PureMagnetik
  Great Deal.. pay a $5/monthly subscription and get a great Live Pack every month

Learning Resources

• AskVideo.com
• Ableton Live 6 101
• Ableton Live 6 102

VST / Plugins

• Native Instruments Komplete 5
  KOMPLETE 5 is the high-end collection of 11 ground-breaking synthesizers, samplers, emulations, and a virtual guitar studio. Perfect for both studio and stage – this is the industry-standard bundle for serious musicians, producers and sound designers. KOMPLETE 5′s instruments can be heard on platinum-selling records and in underground clubs alike, all over the world.
• Major Malfunction
  A sweet plugin for mangling, glitch, distortion and and much more in a easy to use interface.
• Sounds Online
  A top site for massive collection of samples from many sample studios with most of the tools available via VST or other host plugin technologies and sometimes also raw samples .
• KVR Audio
  I check this site to stay up to date on the latest trends in Audio Plugin technology.
• Dblue Glitch Freeware Plug-in: Free .wav Deconstruction

Cool Hardware

• Sonica Labs
  I recently purchased the high end HUSH-QR Quadcore after doing research on all the top tiered custom DAW vendors around the world. Sonica Labs’s price point for a QuadCore Xeon loaded with memory, disk and expansion abilities has been a great replacement for my old DAWs. Talk with ‘Guy’ at the company to find out more, I was sold even before I asked them a thousand questions which they gladly answered to satisfy my curiousities about investing in their products.
• MonoTouchLive
  A brilliant tool to allow you to control your DAW with your TabletPC’s remote touch MIDI interface application!

To be honest with you, I don’t think I have time to list every tool that I use on this post since there are so many but I’ll try to do a follow up post or possibly create a dedicated page so you can come back to it for updates. Enjoy.

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.

A recent article of an interview by Guy Kawasaki on the authors of a book called “egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (or Most Expensive Liability)” is a great read for anyone moving up the ranks of their career and other avenues of potential success in life.

Personally I find that a certain amount of ego is complementary to your professional reputation. One of the first answers in the interview suggests that if your ego has been boosted by success in the past, if one is not careful, that success creates the illusion that it was them alone that achieved that success. And the more publicly visible they are, the more they believe the headlines that attribute their success to just them.

I firmly believe that if you work hard on something and achieved success, your reputation will be increased naturally because word will get around eventually. So keeping modest and being humble of one’s success is not a bad thing at all. The author suggests that a potential combination of ambition, ideas, and healthy ego drives one’s success. So as with many things in life, finding the right balance is something one may just have to learn by making mistakes.

Several obvious tell tale signs of breaking the barrier to becoming an egomaniac that I found interesting in the article:

• Seeing someone you work with as a rival and think about how to beat them.
• Taking disagreement with your ideas personally.
• Compulsively following a competitors lead so they’re not doing anything you’re not.
• Criticizing competitor’s strategies and prematurely discard them as irrelevant.
• Disagreeing with someone’s point just because they’re the one who said it.
• Feeling worse about where you are when you see what others achieve.
• Seeking acceptance: desiring respect and recognition interferes with success.

So now you’re probably wondering what might be considered a “healthy ego”? The following interview excerpt might enlighten you:

Genuine confidence; confidence that doesn’t have to exert itself to prove it’s confidence. Healthy ego keeps us from thinking too highly or too little of ourselves and reminds us how far we have come while at the same time helping us see how far short we are of what we can be. But to understand what healthy ego is, you have to understand the relationship between ego and humility. For most people, tradition holds that the opposite of excessive ego is humility, when in fact having too little ego is just as dangerous and unproductive as having too much.

There are also those people who say that extremely confident and ambitious people can also show signs of being an egomaniac. I can’t argue with this idea either, but if you can balance the image of the ego with your humility and remembering how you achieved success in your life (if you started with humble beginnings), then you might just live a more harmonious life.

Steve Jobs deserves an applause again!

In addition to the recent price drop from Apple for the 8GB iPhone model, an open letter from Steve Jobs gives any first-to-buy iPhone owners a $100 offer towards other Apple gear.

Are you loving apple yet?

Having been a freeleancer myself in several realms (branding / design, IT / software architecture and engineering, business development and strategy planning, operations) I’ve learned a lot from my own experience dealing with clients of all types. I recently came upon a great Digg post that might help fellow free lancers out there to avoid certain mistakes that could hurt your livelihood and career. A lot of these tips I’ve learned through my own sweat but the writer of the original post puts it altogether so well.

These mistakes can easily be made by design firms and other outsourcing companies as well so this doesn’t just apply to potential freelancers.

A lot of it is common sense but the gist is as follows:

1. Missing deadlines.
2. Charging too little.
3. Lack of preliminary research.
4. Choosing the wrong clients.
5. Getting too personal.
6. Letting off steam.
7. Not proposing a follow-up idea.
8. Not having multiple income streams.
9. Allowing yourself to slack.
10. Failing to be yourself.

If you’re interested in what you’ve read so far, I recommend you check out the original blog post.

In addition to this post, there are several other good articles at FreeLanceSwitch.com:

• The Dos And Don’ts Of Selling To Clients
  

  Do you have loads of clients fighting with each other for the chance to hire you? If so, you can skip this article. If not, you likely spend some time selling yourself to potential clients. So read on, because we’re going to talk about the dos and don’ts of selling.

• Balancing Employment and Freelance Work
  

  Not all of us have the guts to freelance full-time right away and you can count this intrepid journalist as one of the cowards.

  As self-employment can be slow to begin, some of us do prefer the security of a steady pay-cheque while making the transition, so here are some of the ways I’ve found to make it work while working for The Man.

• 10 Essential Habits for Freelance Workers
  

  The key, I’ve found, is to develop certain habits that will keep you not only disciplined but successful. Simple habits, to be sure, but ones that can go a long way towards taking you from a broke freelancer to a happy and productive one.

So I’ve been yapping about touch screen technologies a lot this year (Apple iPhone, Microsoft Surface, Jeff Han’s Multi-touch) and you may have enjoyed the essential tools I’ve posted for Apple’s iPhone but I thought that my fellow TabletPC friends out there could enjoy some of the tools and resources that I’ve been enjoying on my TabletPC.

Also if you’re not yet a TabletPC lover and are thinking about getting a laptop PC in the near future, I recommend you review and compare the prices / features of your choice notebooks and also the top TabletPC’s out there. I own the Lenovo Thinkpad X61 TabletPC which I believe to be the best TabletPC out there by far in comparison to the others.

Now here are your tools. Enjoy!

My Favorite TabletPC Software

• ArtRage – It’s free (limited features), and it’s amazing. Kids, adults alike have loved this application that I’ve had on my tablet they love the ability to be able to paint on a canvas just like an artist would do. You can create some AMAZING art with an organic quality I’ve just never seen on a PC. Try installing it now and use the “Load Tracing Paper” feature and show off your masterpiece to everyone
• Microsoft OneNote – This is the most used tool on my TabletPC. I use it for meeting recordings and notetaking. I use it for brainstorming ideas, designing business requirements and workflows for my ventures. I love the ability to OCR anything (screen clippings from other apps or websites, and even what I doodle or jot down). The software allows you to organize yourself in hierarchical groups of tabs so you can organize your notes the way you want. Honestly I’m not trying to make a sales pitch here, but just try it out, whether you’re a student, a doctor, or engineer you’ll appreciate OneNote’s power.
• Alias SketchBook Pro (now owned by Autodesk)- It’s not free, but it is different from ArtRage. The tool is more for penciling, concept drawings, sketches, illustrations, fine art, drawings, annotation, education. Check out what people are doing with Sketchbook Pro.
• Mindjet MindManager Pro – MindManager software, a mind mapping tool that’s also optimized for the TabletPC, inspires people and businesses to align individuals and teams, engage and excites employees, accelerate business processes and win new business faster.

TabletPC Software Directories

• Microsoft TabletPC Powertoys – All of Microsoft’s Powertoys made just to take advantage of the TabletPC
• TabletPC Post
• TabletPC2.com Software Directory

TabletPC Enthusiast Related Blogs, News, and Forum Sites

• Scott’s List of Great Tools for your TabletPC
• TabletPC Buzz
• Student TabletPC Blog and News Site – An excellent blog for students to keep up to date on the TabletPC world
• TabletPc2.com –
  The Place for Tablet PC and UMPC Comparisons, News, Reviews and Information

TabletPC Developer Resources

• TabletDev.com – Essential information for Tablet PC developers and users.
• TabletUML.com – A UML tool for Tablet PCs (that I highly recommend if you’re a software engineer or architect)
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Technion Israel Institute of Technology researchers have developed a theoretical model of a time machine that, in the distant future, could possibly enable future generations to travel into the past. An article on this research was published last week in the scientific journal Physical Review.

By tweaking Einstein’s space time and general relativity models these researchers are becoming more confident with the idea of travelling back in time, something that most scientists believe to be improbable because of the paradoxes and other reasons that could happen if one did so. Curving space time, as is the basis for wormholes to travel instantaneously from one point in space to another, is the basis for this research. So instead of going to another space point in your time, you go from your point in time to another point in time.

Several issues with the stability of such a curve of space time that can cause disturbances are at the forefront of the research which the scientists hope one day the world will be able to solve.

Many people believe that if a time machine using such technology were ever possible, then why isn’t there any evidence of people coming back and telling us about it? If the positive benefit of time travel into the past is to undo our own mistakes in this world, why hasn’t it already been done, or would we even feel the effect in our reality?

The arguments on all sides of the subject bring up good points, but if we are to expect any evolution in this technology we should continue the discussion until these theories can be completely thrown away, by doing scientific research to rule it out.

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Here are some great tools, tweaks, hacks, and other cool stuff for your iPhone.

I’ll probably be posting more stuff like this so stay tuned.

If anyone has any good tools that may be useful, feel free to drop a comment with the url(s).


• 199 wallpapers for the iPhone by ^manicho on deviantART
  
• iWeathr – iPhone Doppler Radar
  
• MacMost iPhone Games
  
• iPhonify – Google Reader
  
• iPhone RingtoneMaker
  
• iPhone TadaList
  
• AppMarks
  
• iFuntastic – Tweak for your iPhone (requires OSX)
  
• NES Emulator (Native for iPhone)
  
• iPhone Fluther -Tap the collective
  
• FastApps
  
• FlickIM
  
• BBSNews for iPhone
  
• i.del.icio.us
  
• iChess
  
• iPhone Music Discovery
  
•