I'm looking at building something like Twitter's fire hose to expose my company's data to the masses and want to build a proof of concept to show how we could use it.

Preferably I would like to find an apache mod that would allow for the persistent connection, but so far I've not found anything with my searched.

If there aren't any mods or libs to do what I want, I'm curious as to how difficult it would be to create the apache module for this purpose.

Once again, my job has me writing mutli-threaded PHP¹ scripts that use PHP’s CURL² library to connect to remote servers. (I’m calling an API here!)  Without going into too much detail, the networking specifics changed between me and the api server, adding a new, or newly reconfigured, invisible proxy to the data path.

This proxy is running Lighttpd, while light in name, is starting to throw around it’s weight and get in my way.

Warning! We are going to get technical!

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 Well it was bound to happen sooner or later. I’ve been published in the latest issue of php|architect¹ of the magazine… I suggest you all go out and buy a copy now. Several copies. (I’ll be holding an autograph session at Yorkdale Mall, Saturday Aug…)

The article itself is a little feature that explains how to write a Wordpress plugin and gives full demonstration code. Give it a read and feel free to ask any questions regarding the implementation if you wish. The code is pretty tight but should have some more security if it is to be used in a production environment. It is really a project starter. If you need to modify Wordpress, this is a great place to start looking to learn how your code should interact with Wordpress.

Not a dig at Yangaroo, but it is nice to be now working for a company who doesn’t deter this type of creativity.

I’m going to attempt to not spam this site with a bunch of non-development work stuff. I’ve other blogs for that… But in keeping with the vein of this website¹, I’ve recently been pointed to a very cool website who’s basic premise is too simple to have not been thought of before now…

We’ve all seen web clipboards and code repositories before², and even I am guilty³ of wanting to get in on the action. But all of these sites are simple repositories.

Marc-André Cournoyer⁴ has a fresh take on the idea. His refactormycode.com⁵ site isn’t just a web clipboard, but rather it is a place to put your code up for community scrutiny.

The idea is that you can post a code snippet and ask for help to see if anyone can help you sort out a problem. This isn’t a wholesale help board for new programmers, but for people who are having problems envisioning code design changes, code cleanup problems, and even those who want the tightest code possible and are seeking improvement.

The website even has an API⁶ for those who want to dig into the site that much more… (Maybe I’ll add a widget here for my refactorings…)

Good job Marc. Nicely executed.