20 Years of PHP







Being a life-long programmer

I read the following article this morning, and found a lot of useful insight in it about what it takes to be a programmer long-term. And, though I’m not approaching 55, as my 6 year old pointed out when I told him my age two weeks ago I am “almost near 100″… Yes I Still Want To Be Doing This at 56

I particularly identified with was the following paragraph

“The thing I find most important today is that you should never work longer, just smarter. Being older does mean you can’t code 20 hours a day any more, or rather imagine you can code 20 hours a day as it’s not really good coding. Is there a real limit to how many hours a day you can actually be producing a quality application? Probably it does go down over time but as long as you continue to learn how to code smarter the end result is still quality, just with less caffeine.”

When I started out of school 15 years ago, it was very easy for me to just sit and bang out code with little preparation or thought put into it. I’d come back, if there was time, and clean up some bit or I’d come back months later and have no clue what I meant to do and kick myself for the decisions and shortcuts I’d take. Nowadays, I’m a lot more reflective when I start something, even if its a simple class. If I can, I bounce ideas off of colleagues, which at the minimum forces me to articulate the pros/cons of approaches I’m considering. I spend less time actually writing code, but have cleaner, easier to use code as a result and usually there’s time re-factor and clean up the rough edges.

Measuring developer productivity








Colorized Word Diffs








Git has this behavior built in using:

git diff --color-words

Also, if you need to share your changes with a designer (who maybe needs to update a PDF…), with this ansi2html script from pixelbeat.org, you can generate HTML output showing your changes. I found that its useful to run the generated HTML through fold so that the lines wrap if you email it to someone.

svn diff foo.markdown | cwdiff -d | ~/bin/ansi2html.sh | fold -s &gt; foo-updates.html



| ansi2html.sh | fold -s

Nielesen: Designing Effective Carousels

I wrote a roundoup of articles explaining why carousels are bad and kill clickthrus earlier. Jakob Nielsen provides some advice on how to design one properly if you really must have one.


From: Designing Effective Carousels

Why global variables are bad



From: Global Variables Are Bad

And a PHP specific article full of excellent examples



Remove unapproved comments from WordPress exports


    echo "\nSpecify input file \n";


$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->recover = TRUE;

$to_remove = array();

foreach ($comments as $comment) {
        if ($approved->length > 0) {
            $app = $approved->item(0);

            // can't remove nodes while looping
            if (0 == $app->nodeValue) {
                $to_remove[] = $comment;

if (count($to_remove)) {
    foreach ($to_remove as $elt) {

$doc->formatOutput = true;
$doc->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
echo $doc->saveXML();

Carousels are bad for Accessibility

I’ve never been a fan of carousels. They’ve become a crutch for designers and clients who want to spice up a homepage presentation with something that moves. ShoulIUseACarousel was shared by a lot of folks I follow, NetMagazine did an interview with the accessibility expert who created the site.

JS: Carousels are seemingly an easy fix to two universal design problems: how do I fit so much content into so little space, and how do I decide what content is the most important? It’s easy to justify away the usability issues of a carousel when you consider the benefits of presenting multiple content pieces in such little real estate

From: Accessibility expert warns: stop using carousels | News | .net magazine

From an information architecture perspective, Travis Lafleur provides a better alternative. In spirit, it’s very similar to the approach we used on DCUnited.com back when I was there.

Consider this simple, straightforward alternative. First, determine essential content to be featured on the page. Keep in mind the desired outcomes of the project as a whole, the mindset and goals of your users, and what actions you want them to take on the particular page. Next, prioritize. This can be as simple as assigning numbers to each item. If users notice only one thing on the page, what should that be? If they notice two, what should the second be? – and so on. If you’re having trouble prioritizing – or have too many items to promote – consider breaking the content into logical groups and spreading it over multiple pages.

From: Biggs|Gilmore – A Critique of Carousels

It turns out they also don’t lead users to take meaningful actions.


From: Don’t Use Automatic Image Sliders or Carousels, Ignore the Fad

Eric Runyon has the stats to back this up, click through to see how many people click beyond the first slide.


From: Carousel Interaction Stats | WeedyGarden

Finally, Jack Shepard lists better alternatives to using a carousel slide.

Let me preface this by saying this discovery is not anything new, however unless you’re really geeking out you won’t be in the know on this stuff.

From: The cure for the common image slider carousel

Highest attended soccer matches in the USA





