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Mikko Koppanen has another quick new tutorial on using Imagick in your applications - this time it’s about making buttons dynamically.

The button in this example is created after this tutorial http://xeonfx.com/tutorials/easy-button-tutorial/ (yes, I googled “easy button tutorial”). The code and the button it creates are both very simple but the effect looks really nice.

The example code creates a simple round button with a fill color and white text. Their examples show a red, green and blue buttons.

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Uh yesterday was a day after my blog posting. Sean said I should stop whining and do things better. Well ok I tried!
So here is The Unofficial PHP Advent Calendar 2007.
Feel free to open all doors immediately!

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Saddle up boys, the enforcer of spam is raising a posse to go hunt those bastards who buy links. Wait a minute, some of those bastards are my mates. Should I rat them out or not?

I like the idea of the posse though, Seinfeld pointed out that it’s a night out with the guys, you get to camp out, you’re away from the wife and kids. As long as you don’t get shot up by the Hole in the wall gang things are cool.

Problem is, I like some of the guys in the Hole in the wall gang, but not all. If a site with deep pockets can buy it’s way into the SERPS simply by paying for links I have a problem with that. I compete in Google on the basis that its’ intention is to supply the most relevant information. Yet it is infested with

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Company
Red Ventures

Location
Charlotte, NC

Title
Sr. Systems Analyst/Web Developer

Summary

WHAT WE DO:
Very simply put- Red Ventures acquires customers for Great
Brands through a myriad of direct marketing channels. We combine
analytical marketers, high performing and often unique direct response
marketing channels, a superior web and sales infrastructure, with a
robust technology and reporting platform. We partner with industry
leading brands such as DIRECTV, SIRIUS Satellite Radio, and ADT Home
Security Systems. Red Ventures success has recently been recognized by
Inc Magazine with the #4 ranking on their Fastest Growing Private
Companies in the US list and by DIRECTV as their Dealer of the Year!

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One of the things that has kept me away from my blog for the past few weeks is an article I’ve been working on for php|architect magazine. It should be included in the December 2007 issue and is entitled “Web Scraping.” So, if the topic interests you, keep an eye out for it. If you aren’t sure if the topic interests you, you can check out my episode on the Zend Developer Zone PHP Abstract podcast for a brief high-level description. I’ll probably post about this again once the issue comes out, but I thought I’d give a heads up to anyone out there that might buy issues of the magazine on an issue-by-issue basis.

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Zak Greant’s Mozilla Foundation report for February 24th to March 1st, 2008.

See the weblogs of David Boswell, Frank Hecker and Gerv Markham for additional reports.

This Week

Finished my FOSDEM 2008 trip in Belgium. It was really great to be able to spend time with my Mozilla colleagues and peers in the free software community.
Participated in FOSSNUT — the Free and Open Source Software Norwegian University Tour, along with representatives from Norwegian Free Software/Open Source companios eZ Systems, Linpro and Trolltech.

Presented the Age of Literate Machines at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.
Presented the Age of Literate Machines at the Hgskolen i Oslo (Oslo University College)
Presented the Age of Literate Machines at the Universitetet i Oslo: Institutt for informatikk (The University of Oslo’s Department of Informatics)

 Traveled to Chicago for an Open Source Initiative face-to-face board meeting. The meeting ran from February 29th until March 3rd. It was a productive meeting that included good discussions on the future of the OSI,  the preparation of many meeting minutes for publication and, perhaps most importantly for me, board agreement that the OSI will use the system I proposed for managing all public issues. Hopefully, the meeting minutes will be published. Keep an eye on http://www.opensource.org/minutes

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Are All The Good Domain Names Taken?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 12 of February , 2008 at 9:49 am

Search engine optimization experts will tell you to pick your domain name based on your keyword research, but that’s getting more and more and difficult. You can do your research and identify 15 of your top keywords and when you go looking for that domain name you like so much - it’s taken. And that one’s taken too. Then the other one … yep, it’s taken. Darn, aren’t there any good ones left?

Some Web 2.0 converts are starting to follow the Flickr formula, which is to drop a vowel or misspell the keyword slightly. It boils down to acquiring a phonetic domain name, or “near misses.” Instead of Mechanics.com, you might see Mechanix.com or MyKanics.com, because we’re cute. But do such domain names work?

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Compositional programming style

In the object oriented programming style, it’s preferable to split functionality out to multiple objects, that can work together to solve a single task. Taken to the extreme, this results in more, but smaller, classes and generally relies less on inheritance and more on composition. In lack of better words, I’ll call this compositional programming style. It’s a style which is usually more prevalent with experienced programmers.

For someone coming from an imperative style of programming, this style can appear abstract and confusing, but the benefits are in the flexibility of the code. If different objects are related through composition, parts can be replaced, without changing the code. This makes it easier to reuse components, and to hook into the code, by providing a wrapper here or there. This is especially useful during testing, since it becomes easier to mock out external dependencies (Such as a database or an smtp server).

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Here are a few ideas Scott MacVicar, Philip Olson and I had for Google Summer of Code 2008 for the PHP projectReplace any