On the TutsPlus.com site Jeff Reifman has posted the latest article in his "Building with the Twitter API" series. In this latest tutorial he shows how, with the Yii2 application they've been building, to analyze your followers and get information like followers, tweets, favorites, etc.

Welcome to the latest episode of our Twitter API series. In our last episode, I built Twixxr.com which will let you discover influential women on Twitter for your account to follow. Today, I'm going to turn the focus inward to look at my own followers.

[...] For a long time I've wanted to look more closely at my Twitter followers and answer some questions: Who exactly is following me? And why aren't they more interactive? Is it possible that only 10% of my followers are real people? [...] The Twitter API is a good tool to investigate this. Yet it has a ton of rate limits which make even something simple like analyzing your followers quite complex. In today's episode, I'll show you how I worked with the rate limits to assess and build a scoreboard of my followers.

He starts with a screenshot of the ultimate result of gathering the information for each follower from the API and describes what the overall goals are. From there's it's all about the code:

• creating database migrations for the related tables
• making the connection to the Twitter API to gather follower data
• saving the data to the database
• creating the "score" for each based on if the account is verified, protected, and follower/friend count

The post ends with the code to show the "scoreboard" presented in the original screenshot having all of the information populated for his follower set.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new post from Lukas White about using PHP and web sockets to create a "live score" widget to include in your site.

The introduction of web sockets makes it possible for web applications to handle near real-time data without resorting to "hacks" such as long-polling. One example of an application requiring up-to-the-minute data is sports scores. Even now, many websites which display this information use Flash applications, since Actionscript provides the facility to communicate over socket-based connections. However, web sockets allow us to replicate this functionality using only HTML and Javascript. That's what we're going to build in this tutorial, along with a lightweight "server" in PHP.

His example uses the Ratchet PHP library to provide the WebSockets functionality to the frontend script polling for the latest data. He helps you get the library installed and set up a simple directory structure for the example. He includes sample scripts for both the data provider (for the scores) and the WebSocket provider. He talks about maintaining the state of the data and shows how to pull out random data from a set of fixtures (pre-defined data) to send back to the frontend. The Javascript for the frontend script is also included.

Most developers have heard of "The Joel Test" to help improve the quality of their software and the processes surrounding it. Joshua Thijssen has taken this one step further and created his own set of questions to act as a test for software development managers to make sure they're doing the right things for their group.

This post is not so much for developers as it is for the managers and bosses from those developers. As you probably know by now, managing software engineers (or programmers) is not an easy task. They just don't like to play by the rules you always took for granted. Why is that? Why are those pesky programmers too hard to handle? Why is it so hard to sit down, write code and shut up??

The questions are yes/no and, at the end of the test, your questions will be assigned to points from 0 to 12. Here's just a few of the questions (they all come with summaries to help you understand what its asking):

• Do you work with lenient working hours?
• Do you give enough time for planning?
• Do you enforce an IDE?
• Are your programmers in the loop?
• Do you have enough distraction for programmers?

In a new post today, Ed Finkler shares some interesting stats he's generated based on some NIST NVD data and graphed out. It shows PHP as being in the top 20 list for more insecure applications.

What follows is a breakdown of the 20 PHP-based applications that had the highest aggregate vulnerability scores (NIST assigns a score from 1-10 for the severity of each entry), and the highest total number of vulnerabilities, over the past 12 months. Of the two, I feel that the aggregate score is a better indicator of security issues.

The Excel charts show the total NVD score and the total number of NVD entries for several popular PHP applications (like phpBB, phpMyAdmin, TikiWiki, and Joomla). He also notes that there are some other extenuating circumstances surrounding these numbers (not a level line) and that the trend seems to be more on the side of issues with forums than any other type of PHP application.

In a new post today, Ed Finkler shares some interesting stats he's generated based on some NIST NVD data and graphed out. It shows PHP as being in the top 20 list for more insecure applications.

What follows is a breakdown of the 20 PHP-based applications that had the highest aggregate vulnerability scores (NIST assigns a score from 1-10 for the severity of each entry), and the highest total number of vulnerabilities, over the past 12 months. Of the two, I feel that the aggregate score is a better indicator of security issues.

The Excel charts show the total NVD score and the total number of NVD entries for several popular PHP applications (like phpBB, phpMyAdmin, TikiWiki, and Joomla). He also notes that there are some other extenuating circumstances surrounding these numbers (not a level line) and that the trend seems to be more on the side of issues with forums than any other type of PHP application.