Hasin Hayder has posted part one of a series he's doing on making an application similar to the popular FriendFeed site in PHP.

Friendfeed is an excellent life streaming service aggregating all your feeds from different service providers, compile them together, build a social network among your known people and finally deliver all these feeds as a mashup. [...] In this blog post I will try to focus on how to develop such a service like Friendfeed using PHP and JS and how to scale such a huge load successfully.

This first part looks at the photo sharing handling of the application, including links to libraries already written in PHP to connect to them (like Flickr and Smugmug).

Rather than having a lots of different blog posts scattered all over covering this year's php|tek conference in Chicago, I figured that pulling them all together here would work best. So, without further ado - the coverage from php|tek 2008:

• the php|tek live site
• slides (as they get them
• Photos on Flickr tagged with "tek08"

• Ivo Jansch: Day -1, Day 0, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 (and wrapup)
• Eli White: Heading to php|tek
• Greg Beaver: phar is near at php|tek
• Ivo Jansch's coverage of the Zend/Microsoft issue during Joe Stagner's keynote
• Brian DeShong's slides - The Grown-Up Company's Guide to Development and Robust Batch Processing with PHP
• Maggie Nelson slides - Keeping You DB and PHP in Sync, Angering the Database Gods
• Sebastian Bergmann's slides - Type-Safe Objects in PHP, Understanding the PHP Object Model, Quality Assurance in PHP Projects
• a wrapup of the conference from Ben Ramsey
• Matthew Turland's look back at the conferece
• Gennady Feldman's wrapup
• Maggie Nelson's slides for Angering the Database Gods
• a heads-up from Marco Tabini to look in the near future for some incriminating video of some php|architect staff in KISS outfits
• Jeff Moore's wrapup of this year's conference and links to his slides - Exceptional PHP and Coding for Success: Writing Software You'll Be Able To Understand Next Month
• Another recap by Andrew Culver
• slides from Greg Beaver - PEAR, Phar and Smart PHP
• slides from Ed Finkler's talks - Building Desktop RIAs with PHP, HTML & Javascript in AIR, Securing the PHP Environment with PHPSecinfo
• an overview from Christopher Jones

Check out more live from the conference on the php|tek Live page on the php|architect website.

Evan Sims, a recent convert from Flickr to SmugMug, has whipped up a little something to help make getting to those SmugMug unfriendly URLs a little bit easier - SmugUrl:

one aspect I didn't like was their URL scheme. They have good reasons for doing it, and I can't fault them for trying to maintain the privacy and security of their users. Heck, I applaud them for it. Still, I like my URLs pretty, and more importantly search engine friendly. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and build SmugURL.

His example replaces this - http://evansims.smugmug.com/gallery/4717671_Ywtjp#279209234_a2ALu - with this - http://smugurl.com/evansims/myst_online...much more readable. He's even created a little bookmarklet you can drop into your bookmarks to make creating the URLs quick and easy. Check out for more.

php|architect is hosting a coding contest that started on Saturday. The task is to grab the contents of an HTML file and grab all of the links out of it, removing duplicates.

You may use any built in function, the phpinfo() of the server used for testing will be attached. You just need to retrieve the links, you don't need to worry about them being relative or absolute.

It should be able to be called from the command line and return the links, one per line. They include how the scripts will be measured (speed, accuracy, etc) and the prize list - $100 gift card for phparch.com, a one year subscription or *drum roll* an autographed picture of ProPHP podcast hosts Paul Reinheimer and Sean Coates.

To submit your entry just email it over to c7ycontests@phparch.com with the subject of "C7Y Contest - February" on it.

For those that weren't able to attend this year's CakeFest (2008), you might want to check out Felix Geisendorfer's summary of the event that happened in early February down in Orlando, Florida - complete with lots of pictures.

Since I'm not much of a story teller I'll make this a picture post (my hosting company should really re-think that unlimited bandwidth package, haha).

He has shots of several of the attendees (including names known to most of the CakePHP community), the location for the conference, shots of the "off time" during the conference and some alligator kissing.

I just want to say thank you to all of the folks who came and especially those who have been involved with the logistics of all of this. It was a pleasure to meet everybody and I’m looking forward to the next CakeFest in Argentina.