The TutsPlus.com site has continued their series looking at using the Pusher real-time communication service in your PHP application with a new tutorial. In this latest article, they show the use of presence channels, a feature that makes it simpler to know which users are connected to which channels.

In this series, we've been learning about Channels from Pusher, a platform that allows you to give your users the seamless real-time experience they want.

Presence channels build on the security provided by private channels, but they add the benefit of knowing which users are subscribed and connected to that channel. The best part is how easy it is to implement and use presence channels, and it's even easier if you've already configured your app to use private channels.

As in the previous articles in the series, they've provided both a screencast of the tutorial and the text-based version. They show how to modify the server you've already created to authorize a user and send that information along with the messages back to the Pusher service. They also include the changes to the frontend client to gather and send user information.

Davey Shafik, a developer advocate at Akamai, has shared some of his own thoughts and perspective on his site about building a community presence for your company and help it "do community".

Your company has decided it needs to “do community”, whatever that means, you’re community manager 1 number one, what now? From my time as a developer advocate/evangelist under both marketing and engineering teams, I have come to some conclusions about how to build community presence. Though my experience is mostly with technical communities, this should apply pretty well to any community building.

He breaks it up into three man sections, filling each in with some background and concrete suggestions you can use to help get the ball rolling:

• Identify Your Products Potential Audience(s)
• Breadth First Evangelism
• Depth First Evangelism
• Localized Evangelism

He ends the post by reminding you that, while these suggestions can help you "get your foot in the door". He'll be following this post up with another providing more about how you can use the feedback you get to enhance and improve your efforts.