"php" in Weblog

I know I’ve not been posting here too regularly but I’ve not been completely out of the blogging loop… I’m using Donotremove as a place for my more general articles on things like the emerging web and online behaviour with more technical stuff going elsewhere. For a couple of weeks I’ve been posting news for the Carsons over at Vitamin, which has been quite fun. They’ve just kinda left me to my own devices and the kind of stuff I’ve been posting reminds me of the kind of thing I used to write when I first started blogging - short sweet posts with a couple of links and nothing more. I’m also posting every now and again over at the Content with Style blog. On top of these two I will have a couple of work blogs to contribute to as well so all in all, I’m keeping myself busy!

While I think about it, the Carsons are running another of their workshops towards the end of August. This time it’s Professional PHP Development from the chap who wrote DropSend for them and it’s safe to assume it’ll be good.

I’m contracting at Wordtracker at the moment. Their product is facinating but just as interesing is their working philosophy.

Management is based on Peopleware by Tom Demarco and Tim Lister, and Slack by Tom Demarco. What this amounts to is a massive, light office where overtime is discouraged and everyone works on flexitime for above-average pay. The thinking is that if your workers are happy and moral is high, they will be more productive, flexible and likely to stay with you, saving you training and orientation costs. It’s about effectiveness over efficiency. This is hardly rocket science but I’ve worked for a number of people who could have done with this advice, and the number of companies who neglect their primary resource is terrifying.

To complement this new age management style, they also practice Agile Development, Extreme Programming and Regression Testing. Agile means that the company’s direction is reassessed every few weeks, allowing for flexible but co-ordinated responses to obstacles as they appear. It also empowers the employees - giving them a clear sense and say in where they’re going. Now, I’ve never had any interest at all in management so the fact that I’m using words like ‘empower’ is scary in itself.

The XP and regression testing seem to go very well together. One of the Wordtracker developers is the chap who wrote SimpleTest, one of the biggest testing frameworks out there for PHP. I’ve had a few pairing sessions and I’m starting to get both the XP philosophy and unit testing. The amount of time I would have spent wading through documentation, let alone writing any code, is reduced to nothing by having an experienced developer looking over my shoulder. I was a proper developer once upon a time and the reason I left it was the intangible nature of back-end programming. I got very frustrated with days spent staring at code and nothing to show for it. Having your tests written before you start not only keeps you on track, it also gives you a real sense of motion. There’s no risk of me going back to programming but it’s been nice to find that I can still enjoy it.

I was trying to explain this stuff to some people over the weekend and I could hear that to an outsider I’m sounding like a proper crazy. Have I joined a cult without realising?

I had my first real brush with XML and XSLT transormations last week and I am very very impressed. The CMS I’m working with generates XML transformed with XSLT to spit out the navigation elements so I had to give myself a crash course in what it was all about. I still don’t entirely understand the syntax but I can get basic things done thanks to the wonders of the web community.

I started with the W3C Schools’ XSLT Tutorial, with a quick detour through their XPath Tutorial and finished with a handy article from Pascal called XSL: the other way of styling up content. Nice one mate! An hour or so later I was writing my first piece of XSL…

So far I like XSL enough to consider sacking off my planned site migration to TextPattern and instead rewrite it as XML-XSL-CSS… The further separation of style and content just makes sense. Why embed your layout into your ASP/PHP logic? I could redesign my site comepletely and not have to touch the back-end code - I’d just tweak the XSLT and CSS. Now that appeals to me.

Man, that was a bit of a mission… For the last few weeks I have been getting random script timeouts on various parts of my site. There’s nothing I can do about that - the scripts haven’t changed so someone on the same box must have been abusing the server resources. Unlike normal db errors I don’t think there’s any way to trap timeouts so people were being presented with those rubbish ‘script has exceeded…’ messages, making me look like an idjut. Yesterday I left Fasthosts and their rubbish servers to find a new virtual home. I’ve settled in dc-hosting for the time being. They offer a wide range of packages, they’re quite cheap and their control panel is comprehensive.

This was my first time changing hosts since launching my site so the process was a little confusing. I wasn’t expecting the switch to be instant for my mail account and I didn’t think to set up a ‘catch-all’ address straight away so I’ve lost last night’s email. DC’s support has been great thus far, with super-quick responses to questions, so I now have everything sorted.

An additional benefit is that they’ve got PHP/MySQL installed by default on their Windows boxes so my planned migration to PHP won’t necessarily require me to change hosts, monkey with DNS records, and risk downtime and lost email.

The site’s back up and running and that’s the most important thing. So far so good…