MatBennett.com

We’ve been threatening to overhaul our entire PHP development environment for some time, but it has always been something we have managed to put off for as long as possible.  With Dreamweaver lagging further and further behind our requirements and the projects that we are dealing with at work getting more complex we have finally managed to take the plunge and get started on this.

I’ve found that locating really basic information on this has been surprisingly difficult, so have decided to blow the dust off my old blog and put down some notes on what we’re up to.  Hopeful someone else out there might find it useful, or better still offer some tips on how we can improve it further. Read on for more details.

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Haven’t blogged in an age, but thought that this was worth “putting out there” in case it catches anyone else.  Some scrote is sending out millions of Adwords phishing emails at the moment, trying to con publishers in to giving out their account details.  I’ve received 2 dozen copies of this to various accounts today alone.

Below is a sample of one of the emails:

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There’s a fine line between optimism and lunacy, and I’m rarely accused of the former.  So why is it that I have just taken on a small contract to try to get a new client ranked on Google in under 2 weeks?  Well.. I like a challenge.

Gorgeous & Co. have a great boutique store specialising in all things for the romantic bedroom.  It’s a nice looking site with a great range of products, but the one thing that they don’t have is search engine position.  Due to some imminent press coverage, that what we are now going to try to get them and in less than two weeks (13 days to be precise… and we don’t yet have FTP access).

As one well known UK SEO put it well need to “be lucky as a leprechaun with a 4 leaf clover on St Patricks day standing at the end of a rainbow”.  Fingers crossed eh?

(Of course if any kind blogger stumbles across this and is feeling helpful, do feel free to link to gorgeousandco.com and help out!

Ho hum.  I had this morning set aside to get stuck in to my look at PHP IDEs and I have to say that it hasn’t been the greatest success so far.

I roped in Tim at work to help me do some of the comparison and we spend a couple of hours trawling the IDE websites trying to compare features.  At the end of that process the main thing we had learned was that the feature sets were pretty comparable across all the IDEs we were taking a look at (Komodo, eclipse, PHPed, PHPedit, & Zen).  It seems that the only way we are going to narrow the list down was by installing each in turn and taking a closer look.

We’ve pretty much ruled out eclipse at the moment.  It seems that neither of the two forks (phpeclipse and eclipse PDT) are going to be what we are looking for.  PHPeclipse sounds like it is developing slowly, barely keeping up with new software versions, and PDT doesn’t seem polished enough at this time). 

We decided to grab two of the others to look at.  Tim is taking a look at PHPedit and I PHPed.

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I had a couple of days booked off work either side of this weekend, and having decided not to risk storms and flooding on our planned camping trip was at a bit of a loose end for something unconstructive to do.  Nosing around various “what’s on” type sites, we stumbled across Paddle Round The Pier, a kayak/general paddling event around Brighton’s West pier - which we just had to go along to.

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 OK, admittedly I’m only 2 days in to re-assessing Wordpress (plus a painful week of porting - thank the bigbang that I never posted more in the past), but I am seriously struggling to stay open minded.  Wordpress is undoubtedly the industry leader in blogging packages, and I am determined to work out why, but boy to they do their best to hide the reasoning.

“Issues” that are already making themselves painfully obvious even at this early stage: Read more »

I’ve never really felt the need too continually swap my mobile phone for the latest and greatest model, but when the navigation buttons on my old D500 finally packed up, I realised that it was time for an upgrade. Checking my Orange account online I was pretty surprised to see that they were offering me a decent spec smart-phone as a free upgrade, and I couldn’t really resist.

I’ve now been using the SPV e650 for a few weeks, and seem to be getting on with it pretty well.  There is still a lot that I haven’t had a chance to play around with, but it seems like a good time to post my early impressions of this capable little smart-phone.

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One of the motivating factors of blowing the dust off my old blog is that I’m about to start investigating some possible changes to the way we develop websites at work.  This is going to involve looking at quite a few solutions and I thought it might be interesting to get some thoughts on these up on the web as I go through the process. Read more »

In order to get this site up and running again I decided to scrap the custom blog/CMS system and just go with an off-the-shelf package.  It would have been nice to have stuck it out with the bespoke system, but it was clear that I had time to either work on the system OR write content, but not both.  As producing a blog with no posts was pretty pointless (not to mention the fact that this is exactly what I seemed to have been doing for the last year anyway!), I decided just to follow the crowd and reach for Wordpress.

Why Wordpress?

That might sounds like a daft question, but I have previously described Wordpress as “utter shit” quite publicly, so maybe the question isn’t so daft.

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Doesn’t time fly eh?  It’s been a week short of a full year since I last put a post up on this site.  The combination of having a very busy year, needing to get my priorities straight, and buggering up the website some-what interrupted the flow of posts for a while, but now I am back.

So what have I been up to over the last year? 

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