According to the PHP::Impact blog, the PHP-based replacement for Twitter has finally arrived - identi.ca.

Identi.ca is a microblogging service. Users post short (140 character) notices which are broadcast to their friends and fans using the Web, RSS, or instant messages. It runs on the Free Software Laconica tool.

If you'd like to give it a shot you can register for an account of your own and start posting. It also supports OpenID authentication.

Hasin Hayder has posted part two of his series on making a FriendFeed clone in PHP (here's part one).

Following the first installment in this series, here is the second part. In this part I will focus mainly on Bookmarking and News services supported by FriendFeed .

He points out some of the major bookmarking sites and the URLs for their interfaces for their users (like del.icio.us, furl, stumbleupon and news services like digg and reddit).

Ever through about starting up your own custom version of a Digg-sort of site? Well, check out this new tutorial from the Developer Tutorials blog showing how to start it in "five minutes flat".

So, you want to start your own Digg or Reddit? Look no further. With PHP and MySQL, you can create your own Digg site in just five minutes. All you need is a PHP web server and MySQL database server; follow these instructions and you'll be up and running in time.

They use the Pligg software to do all of the hard work and describe its installation, configuration and use - simple and easy. You can find out more about Pligg on its website.

DevShed continues their series about working with XML in PHP's DOM extension with this new tutorial posted today showing how to get at attributes for tags and cloning nodes from others.

You've probably realized that the DOM XML library can be pretty useful when working with web documents. However, this extension includes some other methods, which can be utilized to parse attributes of a given XML string, as well as to clone nodes.

They show how to use the getAttributes method, hasAttribue method and cloneNode method to work with their XML examples.

Taking full advantage of the upcoming features in the PHP 5.3.x series (and in PHP6 for that matter), Joshua Thompson has come up with a way to accomplish some prototype-based programming in a PHP application:

With the implementation of the get_called_class() function in PHP, prototype based programming in PHP is possible. The new function is in both PHP5.3 and PHP6 snapshots. So, I went back to the drawing board and came up with a fully capable class. The $this keyword is usable, as well as being able to use the self, parent, and static (new with the late static binding patch) keywords.

Prototype-based programming is (basically) a method where classes aren't prebuilt. Instead they are created on the fly based on other objects and interfaces. Joshua's post is a huge code dump of a prototype class and an example of it in use, dynamically creating two methods and making the three objects available.

Pierre-Alain Joye has a little reminder posted to his blog today about two posts from planet-debian and Apache that refer to clones/references in PHP4 and PHP5 and some of the misconceptions presented there.

Reading planet-debian and Apache (from Sven and David), I catched two posts about clones and references in php4 and php5. I do not think it is worth to explain again everything here as Sara wrote a very good post already, check it out here.

He mentions his annoyance with articles/posts like these and the impact that it has on PHP as well as the person posting.

I wonder when the OS community in general will be mature enough to stop bitching at each other. And that's valid for PHP developers, gnome-kde and other well established wars.

David Sklar points out some of the new base sites that are being offered on the PHP-based mashup site, Ning.

It's been a lot of hard work, so I'm quite excited that we've just released three great new Ning sites: Ning Videos, Ning Photos, and Ning Group.

Plus, all three sites have the juicy bits that every site on the Ning platform gets -- things such as cloneability, complete customization, and built-in REST APIs. I've been watching the feeds for clones of photos and videos -- I suppose seeing who's cloned sites you care about is the Web 2.0 version of ego surfing.

He also talks about some of the features of the Ning Photo cloneable site like the slideshow and, in Ning Video, the embeddable player. The Ning Group application also has parsing abilities to help with sharing documents/music/photos/etc with anyone.

In his latest post today, Ben Ramsey decided to be productive in the middle of the night and implemented the Zend Framework over on Ning.

I couldn't sleep tonight, so, instead of doing one of the many other things on my plate that I need to actually work on, I decided to set up the Zend Framework on Ning so that others could clone it and use it for their Ning applications.

He talks more about what Ning is and points out his sample application he's already set up on Ning using the Framework. All a user would need to do is clone it. For more details on the integration, check out this page Ben has set up to help with any confusion.

With all of the talk about del.icio.us and Yahoo today, it only seems appropriate that this tutorial came across my path today - a HowTo on building a simple del.icio.us clone.

Recently made the move from Mandrake to Ubuntu, and while I was unpacking in my new $HOME (sorry, I couldn't resist), I came across a little del.icio.us clone I wrote in PHP to test out the RDF generating script I wrote (well, adapted) to go with my article about outliners.

I decided to use PHP, basically because it's the only language I've used for web programming. I decided to use SQLite for the database because I didn't feel like installing MySQL: PHP's SQLite functions are pretty similar to the MySQL equivalent anyway, so it's no big deal.

Please note that what I am presenting in this article does very little: I needed to test a script, and only cloned the parts I needed to do that. I did go a little further, but forgot about it until now. Doing something useful is for a future article!

He gives you everything - the SQL, the code, and even how to get an API to the script working.He wraps it all up with a form that can be used to create the needed code for adding an article to the database...