Web Portal

On the Web Development Blog, there’s a quick tutorial they’ve created for replacing a Google search with a Yahoo one with the help of the Zend Framework and it’s Service_Yahoo_Websearch component.

During the Zend PHP conference earlier this year, I got in touch with the Zend framework and learned that there is already a class to obtain results from the Yahoo search engine. The class has features to search the Yahoo API for web sites, image, news and the local search results.

They walk through the installation of the library (not the framework, though - you’ll need that already set up), grabbing the API key from Yahoo and different applications of performing the search.

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New Version Has Improved UI, Real-Time Preview, and Support for Intel Mac and 64-bit OS

Press Release: San Francisco — October 9th, 2007 — Digital Anarchy, a leading provider of cost-effective special effects software for Adobe and Apple products, has released version 3.0 of the acclaimed Knoll Light Factory. The new features in this Photoshop package give increased control over the look of hundreds of lighting effects, and further the creative abilities of photographers and designers to enhance existing images or create original works.

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Popularity: 23% [?]

Chris Merrill has written up a case study measuring the load handling abilities of the Zend Optimizer with a default application - in this case, SugarCRM.

This article measures the performance impact of the Zend Optimizer on a real-world processor-bound PHP application (SugarCRM) under load. Our measure of performance is user capacity. We define that as the number of simultaneous users that the system can support while meeting the specified performance criteria. The performance criteria for this test require that all pages load within 6 seconds and no errors are encountered in the application.

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Not everyone needs a full-on, linkbait creation service. Some merely want help with their headlines.

Following on from recent posts regarding headlines, it strikes me people simply need help with their headline creation. As I scan my RSS reader I weep quietly into my pack of Doritos as I see poor peforming headlines attached to great content.

The reason for this is most people leave the headline to last and stick it on as an after thought. Much better to start with the headline and work backwards. But it can be difficult for some people and can take a lot of time.

Much better to have an expert create the finest quality product which gets results.

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A new post to the php.evangelism mailing list has started up a great discussion on something that a lot of users seem to be in favor of - trying to get PHP accepted by Microsoft to be included in its Dynamic Language Runtime environment.

From the inital post:

I am wondering why there isn’t any effort in the PHP community to get PHP into the DLR. If nothing, DLR is yet another platform, and for a php programmer it gives one more playground to showcase his skillset. Anyway, my question is whether there would be any community effort to get MS adopt PHP into CLR too. I am sure there is a genuine customer requirement, and enterprises have made quite a bit of investment in PHP and they would all love to be able to take it to the .NET platform.

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Popularity: 19% [?]

Rob Thompson passed along some information that PHP users running on Solaris might want to check out - the slightly buggy behavior of the PHP getcwd function on the platform.

Many functions within the PHP codebase relied upon a universally working getcwd() [C] call to expand paths and to find out where a script is being executed. In particular, Solaris does not assume that getcwd() is a privilege that should be granted to users in directories that don’t have ‘r’ (read) permission, even if it has ‘x’ (execute) permissions. […] Under Linux, getcwd() behaves normally but under Solaris, getcwd() does not work with the –x restrictive permissions.

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Cash for Links, it Works but be CarefulWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 21 of December , 2007 at 8:57 am

The following helpful advice was taken from Marketing Pilgrim. I think it sums up some very good advice for those of you that want to build up traffic through link buying. Link buying is a strategy that works, but is increasingly frowned upon and tends to fall into the black hat category these days.

1. Only buy links from sites that are highly relevant to your web site content. If you sell ring tones, that link from an online florist will stick out like a sore thumb! 2. If the site you are buying links from already has more than 5 paid links on the page, walk away. 3. If the site labels the links as “sponsored” or “paid links” or anything like that, walk away. 4. Be selective in your targeting. Don’t buy footer or sidebar links if you can help it. 5. Vary your anchor text. Try to make your anchor text look natural. If you buy links on 100 pages, and they all use the same text, you’re asking for trouble. 6. Avoid any paid link where the seller is also an affiliate for the broker. Those “earn money selling links”banners? Yeah Google can see those too! 7. Check that the page ranks well for its targeted keywords. If it doesn’t rank well for its own keywords, it will likely not help you. 8. Point the links at different pages within your site. Don’t buy lots of links for your homepage. 9. Try to get the links in a contextual format. A link that is part of a highly relevant paragraph will be more valuable. 10. I guess I should round this out to ten.

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Ask.com Aims High With Private Search EngineWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 11 of December , 2007 at 7:53 am

You have to admit that Google is a little information hungry. Some might even say Google is too information hungry, that is why a new search engine from Ask.com looks like it has some real potential. Ask is a big search engine. It might be ranking a distant fourth in the search engine lineup, but fourth is still an enormous amount of search engine traffic.

AskEraser will instantly erase any record of your searches from the company’s servers. Their normal data retention policy calls for eighteen months of retention.

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Popularity: unranked [?]