Derick Rethans, realizing that he wasn't ready to jump back into a full-time position just yet has decided to refocus his efforts on helping make PHP a better place with work on PECL extensions and on internals-related issues.

Instead I will be available to work on (custom) PHP extensions and internals related issues. Extensions are a great way around PHP's limitations and performance issues.

His first project is a QuickHash extension to interface with the popular StumbleUpon and works more efficiently by using more clearly defined data structures. There's no stable release yet, but keep an eye on the subversion repository for the latest enhancements.

In this new post to his blog Joshua Eichorn talks about a an automatic URL shortening service he has worked up, Su.pr, and how you can use their API to create shortened URLs for you own site.

Last week we launched our API which lets you integrate shorten and post functionality into any site or application. Today we are adding the ability to use your own domain for shortening. This lets you have urls like http://joshuaeichorn.com/9OPL so your readers can know what domain they are going too before they click on the link.

Using the API lets you set up, via a mod_rewrite (or any other URL rewriting tool) to match requests on your domain for a shortening code and make the call back to get the original URL as stored on the Su.pr service. You can find more details at this page on the StumbleUpon site.

Andreas Gohr has posted some info and code about one of the social networking/linking services out there, StumbleUpon. His post includes PHP code to figure out what your site's StumbleUpon ranking is.

StumbleUpon recently(?) added a "search result enhancement" feature to their toolbar. It adds StumbleUpon "star ratings" to Google results (See screenshot). This got me interested and I had a closer look at their extension...

As part of this "closer look" he came up with the code to return a general ranking for the URL you would give it. It does require a StumbleUpon auth key and username, but if you use the service already, you're one step ahead on that.

Andreas Gohr has posted some info and code about one of the social networking/linking services out there, StumbleUpon. His post includes PHP code to figure out what your site's StumbleUpon ranking is.

StumbleUpon recently(?) added a "search result enhancement" feature to their toolbar. It adds StumbleUpon "star ratings" to Google results (See screenshot). This got me interested and I had a closer look at their extension...

As part of this "closer look" he came up with the code to return a general ranking for the URL you would give it. It does require a StumbleUpon auth key and username, but if you use the service already, you're one step ahead on that.