From their blog:

We have long talked about 'bringing blogging to the masses' and today we have released a new version of fav.or.it which we think moves a quite a few steps towards that goal. We hope that we have firstly simplified the interaction with blogosphere and in turn made it accessible to a whole new audience. And for the more tech aware users we hope we have a raft of features that will also appeal.

Some of the more important things the site can do include conversation tracking, identity management, simple and easy to use searching, integrated commenting and much more. Check out Nick's list for more great features or just make a login and check it out for yourself.

TechCrunch is announcing Google's new "App Engine" service being launched this evening. The basic service is a full app stack hosted and managed by Google, providing a web framework (maybe I'm misreading this?) and the Google 'big table' database service. [...] My question is "why was Python was chosen instead of PHP?"

There's been some great responses since it was originally posted including everything from agreement to rationalizations for the move (though there is a fair amount of PHP and Python bashing going on - an obvious occurance).

There is a new PHP magazine called "Enterprise PHP" available in English, German and French which might even console those missing the apparently ill-fated International PHP Magazine. Back before publication the usual tree of suspects led me to being interviewed for the initial edition published a short while back.

The current issue (which you can get for free after a survey) has articles looking at testing your PHP scripts, how "professional" it is to use PHP and the fact that Java is not PHP (wait, isn't that backwards?)

They also included a Behind the Site section that lists the technologies they're using to make things work - Zend Core, the Zend Framework, Zend Platform for the server, the iBuildings Web Development Environment and the Smarty Template Engine.

There's lots more information presented on the front page than before including tabbed sections for business/technical topics and news/events. Head on over and check out the new look and feel for yourself.

Derick Rethans comments:

he website will be enhanced with other features, such as dedicated RSS feeds, case studies, links to external articles and more. Together with the new website the project also gets a new logo, of which you can see one variant right in this post.

This new logo is on the new website as well as being available for download in a variety of useful formats.

So, I thought to myself, instead of recommending people, I could provide a place where available PHP professionals looking for work could list. Then companies can look up the list of available professionals and contact them directly.

Developers are divided first by country, then by name and have all the contact information you'd need (address, zip, location, phone) to get in contact with the developer. You can also add your own profile to the directory to make it easier for others to find you.

Microsoft is eager to announce availability of the Go Live release of Microsoft FastCGI Extension for IIS 5.1/6.0 (FastCGI Extension) as a free download from the IIS community site, www.iis.net. The Go Live release is the last step in the Microsoft beta process and represents thehighest level of quality and reliability. For the first time, customers have a license that permits them to deploy the FastCGI Extension on their production Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS 6) Web servers.

Bill answers a few key questions - like "is it ready for production?" and "where do I get it?" while the Zend Developer Zone gives more of the background on the path the extension has taken, how it's supported and what sort of future Microsoft has planned for it.

PRADO is a component-based and event-driven framework for rapid Web programming in PHP 5. PRADO reconceptualizes Web application development in terms of components, events and properties instead of procedures, URLs and query parameters.

Recent updates to the blog include an interview with Dario Rigolin of foxcoverplay.com and several Prado Watch editions. Keep checking back for the latest updates on this great framework.

Welcome to PHP Powered. The point of the site is simple. We want to create a comprehensive list of sites that use PHP. The list of sites here is contributed and updated by you, the users/visitors. To add a site, you must have a valid account with the site. Create an account, respond to the verification email, and proceed to add your site.

The site allows developers/users/anyone really to signup and add the sites they know are running on PHP to share with the world. You can also check out the listing page that lets you search and sort by the type of site, the PHP version that it's running, and the operating system it runs on.

Now I have to admit to being curious about what is going on - after all anything new dealing with the web affects me as PHP coder. Since the W3C is supposedly interested in input from the Web community and content developers, I decided to see who from PHP would be there. Granted it is very early for the formation of the group so it didn't really surprise me to see no one from PHP that I know or heard about in there, but I wonder if anyone from the PHP Group will become a "invited expert" somewhere down the road.

The group is looking for members to help define this next generation of markup on the web. Check out their page for some of the qualifications needed to participate and for some of the upcoming events.W3C Launches New HTML Working Group