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.

In a recent post to his blog, Michael Kimsal asks a question that I'm sure PHP developers everywhere are wondering - why did Google choose to go with Python as the programming language of choice for their new App Engine service.

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).

Padraic Brady has pointed out the "new kid in town" when it comes to magazines about PHP - Enterprise PHP:

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?)

As both Bill and the Zend Developer Zone announce, the latest version of the FastCGI extension for IIS has been released:

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.