Nick Halstead and crew have launched fav.or.it (yesterday), a social site that seeks to "bring blogging to the masses" and runs on top of the Zend Framework.

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.

A few days back there was a post on the "The Codist" blog about why the author would never quite understand the appeal of PHP to the masses and some of his thoughts behind it. Well, there was such an outcry and response to his comments that he's written up another post on what he learned from comments made.

Clearly I touched a nerve. However I did learn a lot of things that you don't read in a quickly tutorial on PHP. The whole point of writing something is to get feedback, positive or negative, and hopefully learn from it.

He admits that his experience with PHP and its developers has been limited, so his perspective might have been thrown off a bit. He still holds to one thing from the previous article, though - that PHP just isn't for him.

A few days back there was a post on the "The Codist" blog about why the author would never quite understand the appeal of PHP to the masses and some of his thoughts behind it. Well, there was such an outcry and response to his comments that he's written up another post on what he learned from comments made.

Clearly I touched a nerve. However I did learn a lot of things that you don't read in a quickly tutorial on PHP. The whole point of writing something is to get feedback, positive or negative, and hopefully learn from it.

He admits that his experience with PHP and its developers has been limited, so his perspective might have been thrown off a bit. He still holds to one thing from the previous article, though - that PHP just isn't for him.

In an "interesting" post to The Codist blog, there's one developer's look at PHP and his confession that he'll never quite understand the appeal of the language.

How PHP can be so popular is beyond me; the whole sense of encouraging all of your html, code, bindings, javascript, even sql (as in the below example) into a single file is a nightmare.

He Goes on to talk about his experience with JSP versus PHP and some perspectives on how PHP lacks features he's used to or how other developers he's talked to had similar issues.

One thing that concerns me (and apparently several others in the PHP community) is that he keeps talking about procedural PHP code that's an "all in one page" kind of setup. Well, of course this can get messy quickly - that's no way to code anything, much less PHP. Organization means more than just breaking code up into chunks on your page (though it's a very low-level start). Plus, the sample code he provides is a joke - a PHP developer with a few weeks of experience could push out something 10x better.

In an "interesting" post to The Codist blog, there's one developer's look at PHP and his confession that he'll never quite understand the appeal of the language.

How PHP can be so popular is beyond me; the whole sense of encouraging all of your html, code, bindings, javascript, even sql (as in the below example) into a single file is a nightmare.

He Goes on to talk about his experience with JSP versus PHP and some perspectives on how PHP lacks features he's used to or how other developers he's talked to had similar issues.

One thing that concerns me (and apparently several others in the PHP community) is that he keeps talking about procedural PHP code that's an "all in one page" kind of setup. Well, of course this can get messy quickly - that's no way to code anything, much less PHP. Organization means more than just breaking code up into chunks on your page (though it's a very low-level start). Plus, the sample code he provides is a joke - a PHP developer with a few weeks of experience could push out something 10x better.