Johannes Schluter has posted about an interesting little project he's worked up to find his own path to usefulness in Twitter - a PHP extension that tweets bugs to his account.

The other thing I see there are people telling me what errors in their applications they are currently fixing. I can't see why that's interesting. But as people seem to be interested I found out that I have stuff to say, too, or better my PHP has, since sometimes I have errors there, too. But well, I'm lazy so I don't want to "twitter" them myself.

His "little PHP extension" that automatically sends the reported error out to the designated account. Of course, it tends to slow things down (connection to a remote machine and all) but it could be useful for sending an SMS is something pops up.

Stuart Herbert has announced the release of a new site that takes the place of providing SMS messages to UK users from twitter, twittex.com - a site created with the symfony framework.

Last Thursday, twitter was forced to withdraw its free SMS alerts service to UK users. [...] Six days later, thanks to the power of symfony, PHP, mysql and q4m, we've built and launched a replacement service called twittex.com.

The site lets you prepay for the messages you want to use. Using the symfony framework made it easy to get a system up and running quickly and easily (in six days!) to fill the gap suddenly left by twitter's decision.

As the time for this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo grows closer, there's more and more talk about who'll be there and what will be talked about. The Zend Developer Zone is taking the opportunity to do a little looking back - and having some fun in the process. They're hosting a ZendCon trivia contest for some fabulous prizes.

Let's have a little fun, shall we? Here is what we'll do. I'll ask ZendCon or PHP trivia via twitter (http://twitter.com/zendcon) and the first person to email me the correct answer at contest@zend.com will win a prize.

Up for grabs are ZendCon trading cards, books, elePHPants and copies of Zend Studio. Remember, you have to be following zendcon on twitter to get the questions and answers must be submitted via email (no DM, IM, tweets or IRC answers will count).

Douglas Brown has put together an announcement for a web service he's come up with (and made available for download) to make a tag cloud out of the top keywords from your twitter feed.

The problem I was having was actually judging whether or not it would be worth my time following their tweets. I mean, I follow someone that is really respected in a certain field, only to find out that they tweet about their new puppy they just got more than anything. So I made a PHP script that generates a "Twitter Tag Cloud." Using this, you can generate your own Twitter tag cloud to put on your personal site to display the top keywords that you have been tweeting about.

You can either check out an example of the cloud through the form in the post, use his REST service to get the keywords for a user or you can download his code and try it out for yourself.

The Zend Developer Zone has reminder posted about some of the upcoming webinars brought to you from Zend on a wide range of topics:

• What's New in Zend Framework 1.6?
• Continuous Integration with PHPUnderControl Part 1
• Continuous Integration with PHPUnderControl Part 2
• Zend Framework and Dojo Integration

If you're on Twitter and would like to keep up with the upcoming webinars, just follow webinarsatzend.

According to the PHP::Impact blog, the PHP-based replacement for Twitter has finally arrived - identi.ca.

Identi.ca is a microblogging service. Users post short (140 character) notices which are broadcast to their friends and fans using the Web, RSS, or instant messages. It runs on the Free Software Laconica tool.

If you'd like to give it a shot you can register for an account of your own and start posting. It also supports OpenID authentication.

Evan Sims has posted about the launch of a CodeIgniter-driven application that brings the bash.org quoting abilities to the world of Twitter.

Today marks the launch of TwitterBash, a concept conceived and design by my good friend Judson Collier. [...] TwitterBash takes the concept of the long Internet-famous bash.org, which allows folks to post snippets and quote conversations from IRC, and applies it to Twitter. Just sign up for an account, then head to the submit page. Pop in the permalink for a tweet you want to quote and you're done.

The site runs on the PHP5 CodeIgniter framework allowing for fast and easy development. There's already a pretty good amount of content, so go over and check it out (and submit some of your own).

According to Akash Mehta in this new post on the SitePoint PHP blog, all of the frameworks out there aren't really needed because "last we checked, PHP IS a framework".

Now, consider the "average" PHP frameworks. They help you handle request data, manage your output, control app flow - essentially, extending PHP's inbuilt functionality. They are, therefore, PHP frameworks on the PHP framework. PHP provides a vast array (pardon the pun) of functionality out of the box. But when you want to do things your way, it gets out of the way, and this is really important when building anything beyond a simple database frontend.

He suggests that PHP is a "half framework" on its own, providing quick an easy methods and functionality to build up applications. He gives an example of Twitter (and really, who isn't picking on them these days) and how it probably could have avoided a lot of the issues it is seeing if it had gone with something a bit more efficient and flexible.

Be sure to check out the comments for some other great opinions from the community.

Along with the popularity of Twitter has come one of it biggest problems - its instability. More and more people are using the service every day and some are leaving when they encounter the frustration of too much downtime. Enter a project that Graham Christensen is getting started - Stablr, a PHP-based version of the popular web service.

Stablr, the proposed name, will be the main gateway for it's users. People will post to Stablr, which will then (when it can) forward it to Twitter. If a Stablr users posts to Twitter directly, the message will be retrieved and replicated on Stablr. Responses to posts, direct messages, and tweets from friends of Stablr users would also be replicated.

He's already seen some great response from the community with offers to help and has taken it to the next level by coming up with a five-page document detailing the plans behind the project (using things like caching, an Access database and Jabber integration).

Rather than having a lots of different blog posts scattered all over covering this year's php|tek conference in Chicago, I figured that pulling them all together here would work best. So, without further ado - the coverage from php|tek 2008:

• the php|tek live site
• slides (as they get them
• Photos on Flickr tagged with "tek08"

• Ivo Jansch: Day -1, Day 0, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 (and wrapup)
• Eli White: Heading to php|tek
• Greg Beaver: phar is near at php|tek
• Ivo Jansch's coverage of the Zend/Microsoft issue during Joe Stagner's keynote
• Brian DeShong's slides - The Grown-Up Company's Guide to Development and Robust Batch Processing with PHP
• Maggie Nelson slides - Keeping You DB and PHP in Sync, Angering the Database Gods
• Sebastian Bergmann's slides - Type-Safe Objects in PHP, Understanding the PHP Object Model, Quality Assurance in PHP Projects
• a wrapup of the conference from Ben Ramsey
• Matthew Turland's look back at the conferece
• Gennady Feldman's wrapup
• Maggie Nelson's slides for Angering the Database Gods
• a heads-up from Marco Tabini to look in the near future for some incriminating video of some php|architect staff in KISS outfits
• Jeff Moore's wrapup of this year's conference and links to his slides - Exceptional PHP and Coding for Success: Writing Software You'll Be Able To Understand Next Month
• Another recap by Andrew Culver
• slides from Greg Beaver - PEAR, Phar and Smart PHP
• slides from Ed Finkler's talks - Building Desktop RIAs with PHP, HTML & Javascript in AIR, Securing the PHP Environment with PHPSecinfo
• an overview from Christopher Jones

Check out more live from the conference on the php|tek Live page on the php|architect website.