On the BinaryTides blog there's a series of posts that share some tips and suggestions aimed at helping you and your code be the best they can be - things to enhance your application (including suggestions not just about code but also about environment and development practices).

The three posts in the series include tips like:

• Maintain debugging environment in your application
• Collect all output at one place , and output at one shot to the browser
• Set the correct character encoding for a mysql connection
• Do not gzip output in your application , make apache do that
• Don't check submit button value to check form submission
• Process arrays quickly with array_map
• Avoid direct SQL query , abstract it
• Never set error_reporting to 0
• Make a portable function for executing shell commands

Obviously, not all of these will apply in all situations, but they're an interesting list. Most will come with good explanations and code samples when appropriate.

In this second part of their "dynamic twitter signature" series DevShed expands on the previous part and adds in code to work with the GD libraries to make the image.

In my last article we began putting together a solution that will allow us to display dynamic Twitter signature images in forum posts and emails. In this article we’ll continue where we left off by adding the functions that will harness the power of GD to create the actual image.

They review the previous code - a simple class that makes a request to the twitter servers for the latest statuses from the user - and adds on the fetching of the user's avatar and to push the text content into the generated image.

In a new blog post Christopher Jones mentions the feature freeze that's happened for the PHP 5.3 series including the Oracle support through the OCI8 extension.

The volume of commits has recently increased in anticipation of today's feature freeze deadline. I expect the Alpha release time frame will also see high activity. Eventually, increased tightening of criteria for patch acceptance will bring us to Beta and then Production releases.

Features included in this most recent extension version include an allowance for external authentication, a change to let Reflection correctly show function/method arguments, an increase on the oci8.default_prefetch setting and correctly defining the SQLT_BDOUBLE and SQLT_BFLOAT constants.

Keep an eye out for a release on PECL with these new updates soon.

Ligaya Turmelle has relayed some great news in her latest blog entry, something that the web's been needing for a long time - a new group from the W3C created specifically for enhancing the HTML standard.

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

Ligaya Turmelle has relayed some great news in her latest blog entry, something that the web's been needing for a long time - a new group from the W3C created specifically for enhancing the HTML standard.

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