Simon Willison’s Weblog

PHP Documentor

phpDocumentor version 1.1.0rc2 has been released over at www.phpdoc.org. The feature list (from their press release):

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Blog fixed

I’ve just finished rebuilding the main data file for this blog, after it became corrupted last night due to a “Disk Quota Exceeded” error. It looks like this was my fault—I inadvertantly filled up my disk space when I was playing around with libxml and PHP choked when it tried to save the latest update to my blog. Luckily no data was permanently lost as the archives are cached as flat files, which allowed me to rebuild the data file from scratch.

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My first XHTML mind bomb

I’ve been looking at PHP’s XML handling functions (in particular the xml_parse() function) and I’ve suddenly realised the advantages of writing entries in valid XHTML. Before I started this blog one of the features I considered adding was something that can pull all of the links out of an entry when it is submitted and index them or add them to a directory somewhere. I was preparing myself for some regular expression hacking, but thanks to XHTML this is now completely unnecessary. All I need to do is define a couple of handlers to deal with <a> tags and Expat will do the hard work for me. In fact, this approach gives me a great deal of flexibility in what I do with my entries. I can extract quotes and blockquotes, pick up on emphasized text and generally allow my blog software to “understand” my entries as and when I add them. The true benefits of XHTML have suddenly become clear.

Zend Engine 2 alpha

I don’t know how I missed this, but the PHP group have released an alpha version of PHP with the Zend Engine 2 (tarball / Windows binary). This is exciting stuff—the new scripting engine has vastly improved object support and brand new exception handling, something I’ve wanted in PHP for a long time. The CHANGELOG lists the new features and provides sample code. Here’s a summary:

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Todo list

Weblog TODO List

I’ve got the bare bones of a weblog up and running now— essentially the ability to add entries which are categorised and archived in a permanent location. Still to come...

1. An edit function
2. A comments system (probably similar to Jonathan Delacour’s)
3. RSS feeds for individual categories
4. Referral tracking (as seen on diveintomark)
5. A better form of overall statistics tracking than that provided by the University
6. A system for storing more permanent feature articles
7. An XML-RPC API for posting with an accompanying PythonCard application
8. An interface for editing my Blog Roll
9. Allow visitors to include/exclude categories via cookies
10. A preview post feature
11. A link directory that accumulates links automatically by parsing blog entries
12. Dancing monkeys—definitely dancing monkeys

This blog is written in PHP and uses serialized PHP objects in flat text files for storage. I will put together a full article on how everything works as soon as I’ve implemented a “permanent feature” archive.

Blogging aint easy

Blogging isn’t nearly as easy as it looks. After several days hacking around in PHP (I’m far too proud to use an off the shelf solution) I find myself confronted with a blank slate, and writers block has taken hold. The toughest thing is working out what style to use in blog entries—my previous writing for the web has been primarily on forums (where posts do not have to stand on their own) or news sites where a formal, unopinionated tone is required. A blog should be informal but informative, with each post hopefully adding a new angle to the topic in hand. I’m sure it will get easier as I go along...