Throughout the blogosphere I'm always seeing these blogs, that while they look great, are horribly slow and overburdened. Over the past few months I have become somewhat of a website optimization specialist, bringing my own site from an over 250kB homepage to its current 34kB.

I will help you achieve some of the same success with a few, powerful tips. Most of these are common sense, but I can't stress their importance enough. I will concentrate on the website and not the server in this article, as there are too many things to discuss when it comes to server optimization.

The five tips mentioned include "Reduce Overall Latency by Reducing HTTP Requests" and "Compression", each with a paragraph or so of explaination as to what it is and how to implement it. There's even a PHP-specific one that talks about a paring down of the bits of functionality that really aren't needed.

I placed this entry under 'programming' but it might as well have been placed under 'rants' really. I've been programming PHP for over six years now. It's still definitely my language of choice because of it's speed, ease of use, ease of deployment and last but not least: because of the huge community with all of it's advantages. However there's one thing that's really bugging me lately: PHP is seriously suffering from what a friend of mine called 'the Apache syndrome'. Apache 2.x has been released a long, long time ago. Yet, tons of servers are still running 1.3.x and they probably will continue to do so for years to come.

While this isn't all that serious for a webserver (as long as it serves it's stuff and the server doesn't break it's fine) I believe the case is different with PHP.

He goes on to say that PHP is loosing out on the "coolness factor" to Ruby on Rails, and that most PHP developers out there just aren't taking advantage of the new features/better performance that PHP5 has to offer.]]> Tue, 21 Feb 2006 07:22:18 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4779 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4779 part two of their "Abstract Classes in PHP" series today, this time focusing on the creation of an example class structure.

Welcome to part two of the series "Abstract classes in PHP." In three tutorials, this series introduces the key concepts of abstract classes in PHP 4-PHP 5, and explores their application and use in different object-oriented development environments. Whether you're an experienced PHP developer wanting to fill in some gaps related to abstract classes, or only a beginner starting to taste the power of object-based programming in PHP, hopefully you'll find this series enjoyable and instructive.

They take a moment and look at how their example will be structured before jumping into the code. After that, they creat subclasses of the parent, defining the resultProcessor and fileProcessor classes. At the end, they combine them, creating a class that can parse data pushed into it (such as parsing out an XML file).]]> Wed, 01 Feb 2006 07:54:08 -0600