Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

I seized the boring time in the past days (I've had a really bad cold) and migrated my photo gallery to Flickr. So far I hosted the photos on my own, using Gallery. While Gallery is a great tool that allowed me to comfortablly manage and present my images, it has one great flaw: I host it by myself. That means a) that serving images from my server costs quite a bit of performance, if you involve PHP and even a database, and b) that I need to take care for updates myself. The first issue is a minor one, since my server is powerful enough to serve the job and not that many people are interessted. The second topic is much more disturbing, since I need to keep track about security updates all the time and need to bring an update in place ASAP, if one occurs.

Long story short, I played with the idea of migrating to Flickr for a longer time now and the only point that was keeping me back was the migration effort. Luckily a little Gallery module, called Gallery2Flickr, exists, which eases the job quite a bit. Therefore I seized the chance and performed the migration of all existing albums by now and you can find my image collection on Flickr, now. Sorry for destroying all the external photo links this way, anyway you can still reach my gallery on http://photos.schlitt.info and through the long way http://schlitt.info/applications/gallery.

Mi friend Kristian from eZ Systems noted this morning, that comments on my blog were disabled. That was actually an accedent, because I shutted down comments some days ago to stop a spam wave and forgot to switch them on again. I now re-enabled comments and trackbacks. If you ever want to comment on one of my posts and find comments disableds, don't hesitate to send me a mail about it!

Yes, it's true, exactly 3 years ago I wrote my first blog entry. By that time I would never have imagined, that I would keep blogging for more than 3 years and that more or less constantly. My weblog now contains 458 entries. Surely, there is some bulshit in it and if I go back, I sometimes wonder, why a specific entry was worth blogging to me. Anyway, in this entry, I want to make a little journey with you and give you some links to the most interessting / annoying / funny / useful / useless / ... blurbs on this site. But before we start, here some more or less actual stats:

Of the 11 categories in my blog, PHP is the largest one, with 167 entries, followed by PEAR (91), Geek (78), Community related (55) and Private (36) and eZ (34). The category with the feewest entries is University with just 3 entries. I recieved 540 comments so far (no, no spam counted) and the most commented entry was my discussion about the sponsored link practices of phpfreaks.com with 28 comments, directly followed by Comfortable PHP editing with VIM -3- with 20 comments. Aaron and Derick wrote the most comments on my weblog, followed by John Doe (the annonymous poster), altogether with 38 comments. All of my blurbs together contain 592764 characters.

But that should be all with boring figures. Let's start a little journey through the past 3 years...

On October 25th 2003 I announced my first talk at the International PHP Conference in Frankfurt. I still remember that I attended it for the first time the year before and was really exciteted to go there as a speaker. This year this is not really anything special anymore, since I've been there every year now since 2003 and will again give some cool talks there. Shortly after that, I already proposed a talk at the PHP Quebec Conference... ;)

On January 17th 2004 I switched from KDE to Gnome, which was a very wise decision... I'm still with Gnome. 1 week later Chregu and me opened Planet-PHP. While the site is hosted and was mostly built by him, we together hold the dominion about the aggregated blogs. Another day later, I announced PEPr, the PEAR Proposal System, which is still in use in the PEAR project to accept/reject new packages. Browsing through the blurbs I remeber again how my car was broken a few days later *damn*.

A somewhat rediculous discussion was the issue, whether PHP5s new OO extensions should use studlyCaps or underscores. But that was already clearified, when a few days later IBM took over Zend. It still scares me, that I predicted something like that... ;) It's almost akward, that I asked what the PHP CLI switch -a means on April 13th 2004... I wouldn't want to live without it anymore, now!

While on the 14th of June 2004 I announced the election of the PEAR QA team, I'm still sad, that I did not have enough time to work on it. A very funny and useful event a few weeks later, was the Anti-Software-Patents-Demo at Linuxtag 2004. I still remeber as if it was yesterday, as we went at the front of the demonstration, dressed like prisoners. I was quite happy, when my employer these times warned for software patents, a few days later.

I think a great day for the whole PHP community was the 14th of July 2004, when PHP 5 was released stable. Quite funny was the discussion about GOTO in PHP some weeks later. In relation to programming, I loved to read "Mastering Regular Expressions", these days. There are still one of my favorite languages, what maybe somewhat related to my usage of VIM. :)

The PHP World congress I attended in 2004 was kinda akward for me. I was used to geek conferences and therefore just took Jeans and T-Shirts with me to Munich... That was a mistake... All of the speakers wear suites and I was the only geek-looking guy around... ;) On October 4th 2004 I blogged about 1 year of blogging. Since I'm now half through my blog, it seems my blogging frequency became less in the past years.

On November 11th 2004 I wrote my first "Comfortable PHP editing with VIM" post, which became a really cool series of entries and I recently posted part 5 of it. VIM is really a cool editor and if you get used to its features once, you can be much more productive with it, than with any fully blown IDE.

PEAR turned 5 on November 21st 2004. You remeber that I wrote I applied for the PHP Quebec Conference? It did not happen in 2004, but I was there in 2005 and it really was a great event! :) On the 18th of March 2005 it was Unix time 1111111111. A few days later in Canada (forgive me that it's sometime Kanada in my blog, thats the Germany spelling), I took the Zend Certification exam, which turned out to be a success a few weeks later, not even thinking about, that I will be part of the certification team in 2006.

Being back from Canada, I joined the PHP Usergroup Dortmund. The usergroup was not very active these days, but more than 1 year later I can say, that we have a really cool core group of about 8 people who meat every week and a wider circle of about 15-20 people who turn around occasionally. With this, please do not forget to sign up for our first large PHP event, the PHP Weekender!

On June the 6th 2005 I started with eZ systems, where I still work happily on the eZ components project. A few days later we celebrated a decade of PHP online, while we had a somewhat official real-life celebration some days later on Linuxtag.

These days Kore Nordmann (yes the guy who made Image_3D) also convinced me to switch to Gentoo, which I'm now happily using for more than a year. On July 30th 2005 I went to Norway for the first time, to visit the eZ systems headquaters and to get the eZ components project started. During that time I also wrote Pearadise (the PEAR channel aggregator), which is still in beta phase, since I had no more time to work on it... Hope I will find time during the next semester!

September 2005 was a quite busy month. Greg Beaver released the PEAR Installer in version 1.4 stable, which allowed people to distribute their own applications with it. During that month I also went to San Francisco, which is one of the cities in the world I like most. I really enjoyed that trip. A month later I recieved a really great gift from my Amazon wishlist from Vidyut Luther.

During the PHP Conference 2005 in Frankfurt Sebastian Nohn drew a quite nice picture of Kore and me in Dortmund. December 2005 and January 2006 were a quite busy time, since we headed forward to the eZ components release 1.0 (30th of January), for which Kore and me baked a nice birthday cake.

In March this year, we celebrated the 1st anniversary of the PHP Usergroup Dortmund. In April Kore made some more cool 3D stuff and Sebastian Bergmann joined us at eZ systems. In May I went ot Bari for an italian PHP conference. Also a very very great trip!

So, and with a larger jump we are here, today, with blog post number 458. You might be wondering, how I can blog right now, because I'm currently on vacation. I have to admit, that I here used Serendipities time-driven publishing feature for the first time. Anyway, it was quite funny to browse through my whole blog one time yesterday and I hope I continue blogging for another 3 years.

So long...

I just came across my website stats and found that the user agent allocation is quite interessting (August 2006):

Top user agent on my website is Mozilla/5.0 with 11.35% of the users. The second place is quite far away, the Google Desktop with 7.95% (while I wonder, what actually sends the Google Desktop user agent, is it a modified IE version? I actually never used it...). Wide before MS IE 6.0 (with 3.93%) is Yahoo! Slurp (on place 3), the crawling bot from Yahoo!, with 7.16%. I wonder why they crawl my site so often? The Googlebot makes 3.08%, directly followed by IE 5.0 (2.91%) and Opera 6.0 with 2.75%. The next place (8) is held by the MSN Bot, making 2.54% of the traffic, followed by 2 times Liferea (version 1.0.18 before 1.0.12) with 4.12% in sum. Konqueror is not very widely used (with 1.79% on place 11), followed by some misc ones (e.g. older versions of the bots) and MSIE 4.0 with 1.18% on place 14.

Ok, that so far for the stats. I found this already quite interessting, but if you cummulate these numbers, you get quite more interessting stats (note that this is only done over the Top 15 user agents, provided through Webalizer):

About 30% of the user agents are from real browsers (Mozilla, IE, Google Desktop, ...), while the second group, the search engine bots, still make about 15% of the traffic. I wonder a bit, why only about 7% of the traffic is produced by content aggregators. If you cummulate the stats per browser, you can definitly see, that most people browsing my side are geeks: The largest group (around 11% use Mozilla and only version 5.0 is under the top 15), 4% less use a version of IE (about, 7%) - while here 3 different versions are still present and I'm shocked that IE 4.0 still makes 1.18%. The Google Desktop (whatever that is) makes another 8% (*argh* that is IE infact, isn't it?). Other browsers (Konquerer and Opera) make around 4% of my top 15 stats.

Finally, these are all lies, damn lies and statistics, but interessting in some way.

Back from vacation I found an interessting article via Kore, which deals with the problem of content aggregation, based on German law. The main sense is basically: "Someone who provides forgein content on the net without asking for a permission violates copyright. This results in entitlement for omission and damages. If the aggregated content is additonally provided with ads, the provider possibly incurs a penalty." Hopefully I translated all the law terms correctly. To avoid misunderstandings, I quote the original words in German:

Denn, noch einmal: Wer fremde Inhalte im Netz veröffentlicht, ohne vorher zu fragen, verletzt das Urheberrecht. Das löst Unterlassungs- und Schadensersatzansprüche aus. Wer das Ganze noch mit Google-Anzeigen garniert, macht sich möglicherweise sogar strafbar.

In fact, the author states, that you violate copyright in Germany by aggregating content from foreign websites without asking explicitly for permission.

Again I have to emphasize, that I do not have a problem with having my content aggregated anywhere, as long as the style and number of ads is moderate and the purpose of aggregation not only to make pure money with my words.

^{Read the previous story about phpfreaks.com}

As I posted a few days ago, I was (and still am) very upset, that phpfreaks.com still aggregated my content through the feed of phpdeveloper.org. While I appreciate that phpdeveloper.org aggregates my content, I dislike the way phofreaks.com does it (with adding ads to my literal words).

Anyway, Chris (alias Enygma) from phpdeveloper.org asked me, if he is still allowed to aggregate my content and I naturally agreed with it. He offered my, to try blocking phpfreaks.com to aggregate my parts of his re-contribution of my content. I fully agreed with that and it seems to work, so far. The recent posts of my content on phpdeveloper.org did not get aggregated.

Thanks to Chris for that!!

Anyway, some of my old posts (either from my blog itself or from phdevelopers.org) are still shown on phpfreaks.com. I still disagree with that and I am in contact with 2 of the local lawyers (one for national, one for international law) to clarify the situation. It looks like there are good chances, that I really can forbid them by law to display my content on their site. I will probably post more on that issue later.

Beside of this, I added a CreativeCommons license to all of my blog entries, to ensure, that I clearly provided the license terms my content is provided on. If you are aggregating my content so far, do not hesitate: If I dislike it, I will clearly announce that to you, before starting to bother about that publicly or taking any legal actions. If you want to do it: Stick to the terms provided by the license or quickly ask me for an exception and I will permit it.

So long, let's see, what my lawyers state and how phpfreaks.com reacts. Maybe I will come around having some real legal issues with them, if they remove all of my content from their website or stop their "in text"-ads. Else I will see, how I can get rid of this in a legal way.

I just found 10 minutes to clean up my blog a bit. I switched the theme from my old brownish, dark theme to a nice grey-blueish one by Sebastian Bergmann (thanks!). It now looks much friendlier. Beside that, I updated my sidebar plugins and added the new eZ components release feed. Cool, now I only have to make up my new website, for which a little tool is lurking on my hard disc for a couple of months now... Hope I will find time after my exam phase end of July.

I recently decided to create a new category to my blog, which is dedicated to eZ systems related topics. I know, my frequency on this (especially eZ components) related stuff was quite high in the past weeks and having all those posts ending up in my "PHP" feed was maybe a bit too much. Therefore, all eZ related posts will now be marked by the new "eZ" category and when I consider the post important for other categories (like "PHP" or "Community related"), I will add those additionally.

My "eZ" feed is also aggregated on Planet eZ publish, while the "PHP" and "Community related" categories also end up on Planet-PHP. The first post about eZ components, which will not end up on Planet-PHP directly is about Kore Nordmann's and my fantastic birthday present for the eZ components. If you are curious, take a look here and if you want to stay tuned, subscribe to my "eZ" feed.

I hope that is a good solution for everyone! :)

I invented a new category in my weblog. Though I had very few categories in my blog, today I added a new one. It happens more and more often, that I post stuff that's interessting (IMO) for the PHP community, but not directly related to PHP. Until now I posted these entries either in PEAR or PHP, depending on which category fitted more.

Now here is "Community related", which saves all entries that are not related to PHP directly, but interessting enough for the community to read.