Thinking about trying your hand at submitting a talk to an upcoming PHP conference but aren't exactly sure where to get started? You might want to check out Lorna Mitchell's suggestions on some of the steps.

Speaking at conferences is a great way to share ideas and meet people - but actually getting the opportunity to do is a little more tricky and usually involves proposing a talk. [...] If you want to go to a conference, and there is a topic you'd like to share some thoughts on, then write them down and submit!

She talks about making the most of the submission form - submitting your abstract and including details why you and your talk should be selected for their conference. The comments include a few other suggestions like "don't submit the same one talk over and over", "try for something different" and remember that you always have something to contribute.

The PHP Quebec conference group would like to announce the Call for Papers for their 2009 PHP Quebec conference happening March 4th through 6th in Montreal:

PHP Quebec is pleased to announce the seventh edition of the PHP Quebec Conference. The Conference will take place in Montreal, Canada between March 4 and 6th, 2009. We are looking for speakers willing to share their expertise with Canadian and United States PHP professionals.

The Conference features technical talks and Labs dedicated to advanced software development techniques with PHP5 and PHP6, XML, web services, databases, etc., project management where speakers and visitors will try to find solutions to actual business problems.

You can find out more about the submission process at this page on their site. Submissions are accepted for both English and French talks.

On his blog, Roshan Bhattarai shares a few tips on keeping your application safe by filtering user-submitted data.

Yesterday, I saw one of my friend was working on the the contact form and was filtering the user input data(posted variables) individually. He was using a function in PHP to filter the input and using tedious approach while calling the filtering function for each variables with coding each of them in single line . Today, I'm going to show you how can you filter the posted variables easily using callback function in PHP.

He shows how to create a filter_data function (for removing HTML embedded in the data) and how to implement it around your data. It could be extended pretty easily to do more than one filtering method to protect your information even more.

Daniel Cousineau posted copies of his submissions to the PHP Women group's Article Contest (Best Practices) that finishes up today.

I made a few posts to the PHPWomen.org Article Competition and felt I should share them here.

His three submissions are:

• Flash Your Errors: It's Illegal In 28 States! on combining flash messages and error reporting
• David Copperfield Wasn't This __magical: __autoload() is Awesome! on using the __autoload functions and PEAR style namespacing
• Path Secrets Of The Most Awesome on making your path operations indestructible across operating systems.

There's still (a little) time to get your own submission in to the contest to get over and submit your article for your chance to win a copy of Zend Studio and maybe get your article featured in Linux Pro Magazine.

Pádraic Brady has a new post on his blog today along the theme of his recent YAML efforts - this time spotlighting the proposal he's submitted to the Zend Framework project for a Zend_Yaml component.

So isn't it time there was something native to PHP to allow everyone work with the YAML format? Well, I think so... So last week I ran off and did some digging, coding, and sacrificed a few white pigeons to the dark gods of inspiration. Once the pigeon blood and other...eh...bits were mopped up, I wrote the proposal for the Zend Framework - read it here. It's nothing fancy, just a general outline and some sample use cases.

And, according to the proposal:

The interface to Zend_Yaml will be deliberately simple supporting the deserialisation of YAML from either a file resource or a native string. Also supporting will be the serialisation of PHP native types into the YAML format. The default return value will be in the form of an array. Similar to Zend_Json, an option to decode YAML into stdClasses will also be offered for consistency.

In a new blog post, Ligaya Turmelle reminds us about the Call for Papers that's still open for this year's OSCON - but not for much longer.

Anyway, here is the link for submitting a proposal and the currently listed tracks include Linux, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, Databases, Desktop Applications, Web Applications (client-side and server-side), Windows, Administration, Security, and Emerging Topics.

The deadline for entry is this coming Monday, February 5th (2007) and all entrants much submit the form for their entries to be considered.

In a note submitted by the folks over at PHPClasses.org, there's details on a change in their book review section. It's no longer just limited to the reviewers the site picks out. Instead, anyone can submit a book review to the site on their choice of PHP book.

Writing books often does not pay enough to compensate the time and skill it takes. Many authors write one book and then move on working on paid consulting as it often pays much better. But writing good books also gets authors good reputation.

The general idea of this effort is to promote more good PHP books thus encouraging more authors out there to get up and get out and write their own quality resources.

Ryan Malesevich continues his series looking at some of the WordPress plugins he's foun duseful in his development work. This time he looks at a feature to make it easier for people to submit your post to the popular social networking sites of today (such as digg, furl, del.icio.us, etc) - WP-Notable.

What WP-Notable does is it allows you to include icons and links to where users can submit your site to the different websites, 15 of them to be exact. The 15 are: del.icio.us, digg, spurl, wists, simpy, newsvine, blinklist, furl, reddit, fark, blogmarks, yahoo, smarkling, magnolia, and segnalo.

I'll be honest, most of those I have never heard of, but it can't hurt to have those options to your visitors who have heard of them and are using it. To see an example of WP-Notable in work, just go to any article and underneath it you'll see the 15 icons with shortcuts to submit that article to those services.

The installation of the plugin is as simple as uploading and activiating, and Ryan includes a sample usage to integrate into your page.

For anyone interested in getting their blog listed on the Planet-PHP site, you might want to check out this new blog entry from Helgi Þormar for a few changes going on over there.

Been a while since I blogged but here I go, I'm now one of the people that handles the blog accept/reject on Planet-PHP and as is Pierre in addition to Toby and Christian S.

One exciting thing has already happened to Planet-PHP since I joined, Christian Stocker added a new way to submit your blog to Planet-PHP instead of the old and somewhat crude way of sending email.

This simple new method (and one that's easier for them to track) is just this email form asking for your name, email, the blog URL, and the RSS/Atom URL - oh, and, of course, why your blog should be included in the "Planet-PHP Family".

Via this post on Digg.com, there's a "PHP Flash Card" application that someone's created using a bit of Ajax to make it all work.

Here's a simple site I created for helping PHP programmers old and new study for certification exams or to simply hone their skills. It has wiki-like features so that users can submit and edit questions and answers.

The site offers a pretty simple interface, but it works that way - too much more and it wouldn't be as attractive. So, head on over and test out your PHP knowledge and maybe even submit some questions of your own...