Brown PHP

As a functioning member of society, I feel it is important to make yourself a well rounded human being. Being able to see and understand the other side of an argument is an important quality in anyone.

To help yourself better yourself you need to intrigue your mental palate. Reading has always been a great way to inspire creative thinking. Speaking from an engineering stand point, my creative thinking could use some inspiration.

What’s on your bookshelf? Do you have a bookshelf? If you would take a look at my bookshelf you would find a number of PHP books. PHP books cover all sorts of topics; frameworks, database design and PHP integration, PHP design patterns, etc…

I don’t have any books cover really anything else! Looking back on all of this, I’m a bit disappointed in myself. I don’t have any great novels. Why? They bore the hell out of me. Not joking. Big popular books I was instructed to read throughout high school and college only taught me to dread the thought of reading books like that.

What is my point of all this? There has got to be more things that grab my interest rather than just PHP. Well, I have never thought to reach out and look for other topics until now.

I’m redoing the Books section of the site to start a “book club” I suppose you could call it for us PHP developers that want to better ourselves and reach passed reading only PHP books. Don’t worry though; I plan on reading some PHP books as well. Some books that have caught my eye are ones that have strong ties to internet topics. So if you are a geek with a blog or know one, you are going to want to keep up with these books.

So when I’m done with a book, I’ll give my personal review in a blog post from which you can comment your own thoughts on the book.

If any of you have any ideas on some good books to read/review just let me know and I’ll add it to my personal list if I find it fascinating.

Well I spent a few hours condensing the PHP code that I developed for BrownPHP into a Twitter class that can be downloaded. You can get it PHP class in my code repository.

Take a look at the class and let me know if there are any methods that you would like to have added to the class. Currently there are two main methods.

1. sendTweet – This method is a popular one that is seems like everyone want to use. It’s a simple method that can be called to tweet something to your Twitter account. This method is very simple and shouldn’t be complicated at all to implement into your own code at all.
   
2. getTagCloud – This is another easily implemented method. By providing any Twitter username, this method will generate a Twitter Tag Cloud. If you have never used a Twitter Tag Cloud, it basically can provide a bird’s eye view of the topics that a Twitter user tweets out more regularly.
   

I won’t get into how integrating your own sites and projects into Twitter can make them more social and viral inducing, but I will say that if you aren’t using Twitter right now you are losing out on a great way to help your brand.

There are so many insightful people on Twitter (granted a lot of trolls too unfortunately) and a lot of great ideas that can culminate by socializing with this community. I myself am going through a re-branding phase. Instead of using my dlbrown06 Twitter account, I will be using the BrownPHP Twitter account to be tweeting about BrownPHP and other PHP interests.

If you are involved in the PHP community, wanting to learn PHP, or are a PHP guru yourself follow BrownPHP. I’ll be sure to follow you as well to continue discussing PHP projects and development.

I’m going to start doing some reorganizing of the site as you may have already noticed via the new site design. One thing that I would like to do at first is create a code repository.

As I’m building websites I’ve started to build a library of classes. Most of the classes I normally create and would like to share involve integration with Twitter, eBay, Amazon and others. The goal really is to make it easier on PHP coders starting out to implement some of these wonderful services into project of their very own without having to review API documentation for hours. Most of which is poorly written…

So I’ll obviously be adding a Twitter Class into the repository first. Then as time goes on, others will follow. Give me some time to go through the classes and document them properly so that developers don’t need to decipher my code. J

You can get to the BrownPHP Code Repository here or simply click the “Code” link in the top banner of the site. Let me know if there are any classes in particular that you would like me to add to the repository as priority. Most likely I already have a class for whatever you are looking for, just let me know.

If you are as involved and excited about PHP development as I am and want to help new PHP developers out there, please let them know about BrownPHP.com. I would be more than happy to plug any of the projects that you may be working on.

So what PHP projects have you been involved with lately? Every PHP project that I get involved with seems like it is a two rapid development project. That is, PHP projects that I have been doing for the company that I work with. I have to tell you, I’m not a fan of the rapid development process.

Multiple times I have been approached asking if this type of PHP app can be done. Most of the time, the answer is yes. Then the follow up is, okay we need it done and working in two weeks. Maybe it is my fault for not arguing the due date, but I can’t help it. I get offered too few PHP projects at my 8 to 6 to pass one up.

Rapid Development Process = Poor Documentation

Well, I was able to finish the project in the allotted time given to me, but not in the fashion that I would have liked. I wouldn’t say mistakes have been made in any of these projects, but I will say most of them could have been documented much better. I have a certain feeling of remorse when I think about the next developer that needs to update the code.

Can I go back through the code to document it properly the way it should have been done in the first place when I have a free second? Sure, but with company budget cuts and co-employees being laid off (working in the heart of Michigan), I’m making less and doing twice as much. So yeah, I’ll get to it when I have a free second.

Maybe I’ll do another post on RDP in the future, because I feel this process warrants more discussion. For now however, let’s talk about our projects.

My PHP Projects

Getting away from the topic of my day job, in my moonlight hours I have been working on Auction Alerts as you may have noticed from my previous post. This site integrates the eBay API largely to help find eBay deals, although the Amazon API is being used as well, but sparingly. I was thinking about implementing the Shopping.com API into the site, but I need to look through their documentation a little more to understand how I could best integrate it into the site.

I have given the site a new theme to match its blog’s. This project has been taking up most of my free time while not at work. I’m considering taking it out of beta soon because it is being used by a medium sized group of people and for the last month there haven’t been any issues. If you haven’t checked this site out, I would appreciate it if you could take a moment to look it over and tell me what you think.

What PHP projects are you working on?

If you are a developer yourself and would like a free plug to the project that you are working on or one that you have done in the past. The community here would to hear about it.

You can either email me a post explaining your project and what is does or you are always welcome to sign up with BrownPHP and I can make you an author from which you can just write the post here on this site. You would just have to let me know.

I’ve been working on a little side project in my spare time that I’m happy to announce that I’m now opening up the public beta. Auction alerts is an alert system that searches eBay for auctions based on keywords that members subscribe to.

I’ve been privately beta testing it for a little while now with a handful of people and things have been going along smoothly. Now I want to open it up to the public. I’m not taking the beta off however because the content and design is still fresh and I want to get some more opinions before I call anything concrete.

This site is definitely useful for people that use eBay frequently, but even if you hardly use eBay at all it can still save you money. To give you a quick idea of what the site is about, you first login after registering for free. You then click, “Create Alert”.

Now you provide a key phrase that you want to search eBay for. You also provide your max price for the auction you’re looking for and how frequently you want the site to search for new auctions. Once you add it, you can create a few more, or you can log off and wait. After the amount of time that you chose is up, the site’s algorithm search eBay for the items you want. If it finds auctions, it emails you. If it doesn’t, it won’t. Simple as that. Currently, I’m only allowing 5 alerts at one time. That’s because the site is limited per number of calls it can make to the api per day. I am awaiting a response to eBay to increase this limit. I’ll keep you updated about that.

I made this tool awhile back to save me some time so I don’t have to troll eBay for deals anymore. The site works especially well for electronics because electronics most have model numbers. Having model numbers greatly helps in finding auctions for the exact product you’re looking for.

I’m also going to try to integrate Twitter with Auction Alerts a little more closely. So look for some experimenting going on there. I’m going to do without a blog for the site. I’ll probably fold like a lawn chair and make one after awhile though, lol. I would like to provide all the information and updates for the site via Twitter. If you want to follow the Auction Alerts Twitter account check out @auctionalerts.

This is going to be an ongoing project for me while I’m not at my day job. I already have a few features that I’ve started working on to add to the site. So I would love to hear any feedback from you guys. Look forward to hearing your ideas.