MatBennett.com

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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