In a recent post to his blog Christoph Dorn shows off a cool little trick to getting your Mac to respond to your (vocal) request for website stats from FeedBurner.

You have a blog and you are proud of it. Your sense of self-worth depends on how many people are following it. Making a detour to FeedBurner every day (the feed stats only update once a day) to check on your vitals is simple and does not take long (with a bookmark) but there has to be a more automated way.

His better way involves tying together the speech recognition that OS X offers, the "say" command line tool and a PHP5 script that can go out and read/parse the FeedBurner XML information for your website. Throw in a little command line script and some set up in the Speech tools and you have a handy little script that can fetch your latest stat information just from your request.

In a recent post to his blog Tony Bibbs shares his experience with getting the most recent release (PHP 5.3 alpha) of PHP up and working on his MacBook.

If there is anything you should gleam from this article for future reference, Leopard comes with a 64bit Apache installation.

He points out this fact because, if you go and build it as per the normal install instructions, it will toss a "wrong architecture" error. He points out a blog post from Marc Liyanage that helped him understand a bit better. His fix was to run Apache as 32 bit instead of trying to get PHP to compile up to its 64 bit standards. He even includes the two commands you'll need to change Apache over to run this way.

Gyorgy Fekete has provided what he calls a complete guide to PHP development on Mac OS X in a recent blog entry.

Finally, I switched entirely to Mac. It is a little frustrating that there is not a complete resource on how to set up a web development enviroment on Mac OS X. The majority of tutorials are outdated. I will try to write this guide as complete as possible.

The guide provides basic installation instructions for PHP, MySQL (XAMPP or MAMP), the configuration of these two packages, throwing XDebug in to help with your debugging, installing Subversion and picking out your IDE of choice. He also suggests a somewhat optional step - setting up a Windows virtual machine to be able to test things out cross-platform without the need for a separate machine.

On the PHP-GTK Community site, there's a new tutorial showing how to install the PHP-GTK platform to a Mac OS X machine:

Installation of PHP-GTK 2 on MacOS X 10.4 and 10.5 is actually pretty simple, as it can use the latest PHP-GTK installer, which works just like any other Mac installer.

They include screenshots as a guide to the step-by-step (extremely simple) process of getting the software installed.

For those interested in technical details, a complete list of the prerequisites is given at step 2 of the installation. Download the installer at http://www.kix.in/php-gtk2/PHP-GTK-2.0.0.dmg

Havard Eide is asking for your help in a new entry to his blog. He's looking for ways to speed up his development in Eclipse, specifically in the debugging.

There is one thing I do need over everything else: remote debugging. Having used Zend Studio for 3 years now it hasn't been the best editor ( I'd rather prefer PHPEclipse/PDT ) but the remote debugging facility is superb [...] Eclipse it has all the tools you need to develop with but the debugging is slow, way too slow!

He's looking for anyone out there that might be able to help him speed up the debugging on his Leopard-installed version of Eclipse ("So slow actually that I had to install Zend Studio 5.5 for whenever I have to debug a file...")

In a recent entry, Sean Coates shares some tips he found when working on a project (the redesign of the php|architect website) and trying to set up a development environment on his Mac in the latest version of Apple's operating system - Leopard.

There are a bunch of things wrong with Leopard, but over all I'm pretty happy with it. I did, however, have a bit of a hard time getting my development environment up and running (I did a clean install). I'll outline the steps that I took to get a functioning Apache, PHP, MySQL installed. Sure, you could use the leopard-bundled Apache and PHP, but if you're like me, you generally upgrade PHP (and use weird extensions) a lot more often than Apple will upgrade it.

He walks through the entire installation, complete with the commands that'll need to be made to both make the install and configure the Apache instance to work with PHP.

Stefan Mischook has taken a little time out from his beginner's guides to PHP to post today about the simplest way to set up PHP and MySQL on a Mac - MAMP.

In my beginners php videos, I recommended XAMPP as the way to easily install Apache, PHP, MySQL on a MAC. [...] This nifty little application allows you to (really easily) install Apache, PHP and MySQL. You are provided with a standard DMG file that you simply drag to your applications folder.

He includes screenshots, details on what the package contains, sample code using it and, of course, the Dashboard widget to start and stop the Apache and MySQL servers.

From Carlo on the FCHouse.com blog, there's this new guide to debugging your PHP5 application with the Eclipse PDT functionality in an OS X environment.

In these months I have developed in PHP with Eclipse PDT (Php Development Tool). During the first days I tried to make the debugging works, but without great results, therefore I dropped and I took back the usual debugging technique of every good script developer: echo $variableName; or simply logging everything possible in some log files.

Knowing that this wasn't "the right way" to do things, Carlo searched for something better. He found a hint on another blog and ultimately figured out how to get his Eclipse/Apache/XDebug installation to work on his Mac. His post also includes the "glue" that you'll need to get them all working happily together.

As Brett Bieber mentions in this new blog entry, there's been an OS X release of the Chiara_PEAR_Server package (a "droplet").

This is a Mac OS X droplet for PEAR developers that run Chiara_PEAR_Server. This little droplet just takes in your PEAR Package .tgz and it will release it to Chiara_PEAR_Server.

He idea of the droplet is to automate the packaging process for a tgz file to post it out to a PEAR channel server. Sounds quite handy - check it out for yourself by grabbing the source from svn.saltybeagle.com.

Bard Farstad has had trouble with ez publishthis new post on his blog.

Running PHP and eZ publish on PowerPC based Macs have been extreemly slow and now that I have eZ publish running on the Intel based Mac I tried to tune it to get maximum performance out of it when running eZ publish as I was not satistied with my previous tests.

He tries three things - patching the eZ publish intsallation with the latest update, installing a patch for the PHP installation on a FreeBSD machine, and finally trying out the ICC compiler for OS X and see if it helped (it didn't). Unfortunately, he's still looking for a cure for his Mac/PHP woes and would love some input from anyone out there noticing the same issue.