If you're ending this year and thinking about making "speak at a conference" one of your New Year's resolutions, you should check out the series of Tweets from Michael Cullum with some helpful tips on submitting your talk ideas to Calls for Papers. His #12DaysofCfpTips can help guide you in the right direction and make it more likely you could be accepted.

So far (as of the time of this post) there's only two in the list:

• "Mention previous speaking experience in your speaker 'extra information' box (including UGs and Conferences)"
• Always get someone to read over your abstracts. helpmeabstract.com is a great place to get feedback

Keep an eye on the hashtag with more great tips and hints to help you optimize your submissions and profile for that next open Call for Papers!

In remembrance of the 20th anniversary of PHP, the Zend Developer Zone has created a new post sharing tweets from the PHP Community Twitter account covering the history of PHP.

My friend - and PHP Community Old Guard - Ben (@ramsey) Ramsey did something awesome for PHP's 20th, he tweeted out the PHP timeline. I've gathered them all here to celebrate both PHP and the work he put into this project.

The post shares a long list of the tweets from the account mentioning the happenings of the last twenty years. It starts with the first release of the language back in 1995 (by Rasmus Lerdorf) and goes all the way up through the present day. It's been quite a ride over the last 20 years. If you're new to the PHP community or just want to relive some of the memories of the past, check out the full post!

NetTuts.com has continued their series about constructing a Twitter application as a Yii framework-based application. In this latest tutorial they expand on the previous post's "tweet storm" functionality and instead posts random updates based on pre-defined content. If you need to catch up, you can find the other parts of the series here.

The nature of the Twitter stream makes repetition useful, within reason; overdoing it is spammy and annoying.[...] This automates the task of repeating and creating variation over time to increase the likelihood that your Twitter followers will engage with your content. Keep in mind that the Twitter API has limits on repetitive content. You'll be more successful if you offer a wide variety of variations and run the service on an account that you also use manually to share other content.

They start with a short list of features the application needs to support including the main goal of posting the randomized, recurring tweets. They start by creating the Group model and table to allow for the grouping of tweets. Then they use Yii's scaffolding to create a form for creating new groups. Next up is the controller code to handle the group submission and an update to link a tweet to a group. Finally they include the code to push the tweets out to Twitter and mark the tweets as sent. The post ends with an example of a timeline with the resulting posts.