He and his site were taken offline by his own hosting company because of one little detail - the limit on usage for the shared server was 3% and his site was using 30%. Going through his logs, he found the culprit - a "too many connections" message from MySQL due to the number of requests.

I'll admit, I was in a huge hurry to get this project done, so I wasn't thinking about the long term effects. Needless to say, I wasn't caching my MySQL query results. I know, tisk tisk.

He added a new private method to his class (using Zend_Cache to store the date) and dropped the call into his controller to pulled the cached info whenever it needed it.

one aspect I didn't like was their URL scheme. They have good reasons for doing it, and I can't fault them for trying to maintain the privacy and security of their users. Heck, I applaud them for it. Still, I like my URLs pretty, and more importantly search engine friendly. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and build SmugURL.

His example replaces this - http://evansims.smugmug.com/gallery/4717671_Ywtjp#279209234_a2ALu - with this - http://smugurl.com/evansims/myst_online...much more readable. He's even created a little bookmarklet you can drop into your bookmarks to make creating the URLs quick and easy. Check out for more.

Congratulations are in order. Since the launch of GoPHP5.org, over 100 software projects and over 200 web hosts have come on board to support the adoption of PHP 5.2. As opposed to just a few months ago, it is now easy to find a hosting solution that supports PHP 5, and software developers can turn to the attractive new features that PHP 5 offers without the need to worry that they are leaving their end users without options.

He gives credits to Larry Garfield and Marc Delisle for their hard work towards making the project a success and notes that the project can stand as a successful effort that the community pulled together on to make development and the platforms we build on that much better. Be sure and check out the long list of projects and hosting companies that made the move to PHP5.

If you purchase a cheap hosting account with many of the major web hosts around today, chances are they will be running PHP 4. The problem for web hosts is this: the PHP community may have moved on from version 4, but a lot of the code out there hasn't.

He recommends one solution that several hosting providers are starting to gravitate towards - offering both to their customers and allowing them to switch between them (via something like cPanel).