On the DotDev.co site Sharon Steed has written up a post suggesting the importance of a non-technical skill that can help you in your career: being a better writer.

No skill will serve you better in your career than being a confident communicator. As important as being able to talk to people is, however, today I want to focus on written communication. Writing often gets a bad wrap, but it doesn’t have to be the dreaded task many of us make it out to be.

She talks about some of her own experience with writing and how it related to the eventual move to public speaking. She talks about how most people she talked to saw writing as a chore and always had their reasons why. She points out that, while most people seemed to dislike writing, they do it all day - emails, chat, texts, etc. She makes some suggestions you can follow to help take the dread away from writing and instill the confidence you need to make it more effortless.

Henry Hayes has written up a handy post to his blog looking at using FirePHP and Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug to log messages directly to your Firefox's Firebug console.

Due to sloppy programming in the past many PHP error logs can become very clogged up and, unless you use some fancy grep technique, unusable. [...] A project has been around for some time now called FirePHP. This enables us to log messages of various levels of severity to the Firebug console! - Awesome. Just imagine if you are developing an ajax app, you could have all your debug messaging in one place.

He walks you through the steps needed to get the logging up and running - setting up FireBug (if you don't have it already) and FirePHP, editing your Zend Framework bootstrap file to add an _initLogging() method and using it for logging, both in the backend script and on the frontend in the console. He also includes a quick update to the logging method that only logs to the Firebug console if the environment is not production.

Next up in the phpRiot "Zend Framework 101" series is this new look at the logging component of the Zend Framework - Zend_Log.

This article shows you how to use Zend_Log, the logging component of the Zend Framework. It allows you to record messages from your application however you please. In this article I will show you how to record messages to a log file. Additionally, if you use the Firebug and FirePHP plug-ins for Firefox, Zend_Log can be extremely useful for application development and debugging. I will also show you how to achieve this.

They walk you through the creation of a simple logger and putting it to use by recording just the events you want (via error levels). There's also an extra section on integrating it with the Firebug/FirePHP extensions for Firefox and push your messages directly to the browser.

On the Zend Developer Zone, Vikram Vaswani has posted a tutorial that shows hos to "break the language barrier" between PHP and Microsoft's Excel to allow for the reading and writing of spreadsheet data directly from one to the other.

When it comes to playing nice with data in different formats, PHP's pedigree is hard to beat. Not only does the language make it a breeze to deal with SQL result sets and XML files, but it comes with extensions to deal with formats as diverse as Ogg/Vorbis audio files, ZIP archives and EXIF headers. So it should come as no surprise that PHP can also read and write Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, albeit with a little help from PEAR.

After grabbing the different parts needed (the PHP-ExcelReader package and the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer PEAR package, he shows how to create a simple spreadsheet with just numeric information in it. For something a bit more interesting, he goes the other way and shows spreadsheet data as an HTML table.

Other examples included as well are things like: pushing spreadsheet data into a database, working with formulas and styling it to your liking.