Ed Finkler has a new post today showing how he's created a tumbleblog using the Gimmie Bar API and backend as a source for the posts. For the curious, the code for his simple blog can be found here.

One of the coolest things about working on Gimme Bar has been the opportunity to build a platform. While most folks interact with our service via the web site, the site is just one application built on top of the Gimme Bar content collection and curation system. Our web site interacts with the system via our HTTP API, which is open to everyone, not just our internal team. That means that anyone can build applications on top of our platform to suit their own needs or interests.

This simple blog (demo here grabs items from his Gimmie Bar feed and posts them. He includes complete installation instructions and a brief overview of how the parts work together.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new article emphasizing something that lots of developers forget to make a part of their process when writing code - creating useful documentation to help make your code that much clearer.

If you're writing code that will be shared with others, put yourself in their shoes. Don't let your project lose potential users, community members, and possible contributors all because of insufficient documentation.

He (Matthew Turland) suggests a few things to keep in mind as you're writing up your documentation - the content is "king" (an emphasis on good descriptions/examples/use cases), open it up to external contributions using things like wikis (or even stored in the source code repository) and a focus on technical writing skills. Even the best tools out there can suffer if there's poor or no documentation.

New from the Decal blog today there's a general post about testing, not writing tests for your code but testing methods for your site as a whole (like A/B testing). This is the first part of a series.

For a long time, we here at Working Software have been strong believers in the "content precedes design" philosophy, as famously espoused by Jeffrey Zeldman and summarised here on UX Myths. [...] We are relaunching this website so we'd gone through the process of creating our "content first" wireframe using Decal Mockups.

They go through their entire process - how they decided what to test on the site, the methods they chose for the testing (including PickFu and Feedback Army) and some of the results of the feedback from each.

Related to this other post about content security policies in PHP sites, DashExamples.com has a quick new post about what you'll need to add to your application to implement a policy of your own.

Content Security Policy(CSP) is a mechanism in the browser that restricts what content will be requested and run by the browser. CSP does this by passing in a specific response header that tells the browser what resources (images, javascript, css, frames, etc) can be requested and accepted to execute. There are multiple ways to setup CSP for your web site, you can use your web server configuration like I showed in a previous example or use a dynamic scripting language like PHP.

What it really boils down to is setting a header, either X-Content-Security-Policy or X-Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only, to tell the browser what security policy to use and how to honor it. You can find out more about content security policies from this page on the Mozilla wiki. CSPs allow you to define how your site's content interacts and help to prevent issues like XSS and data injection.

From DashExamples.com there's a quick post on how you can set up your application to notify you on content security policy violations and store them back on he server side for later review.

When somebody violates your CSP rules, there is a great feature that can setup for supporting browsers to send back the violations to your server to be saved, processed or whatever. This is a great feature because you can stop a possibly malicious piece of code from executing and learn which scripts may have vulnerabilities in your code.

The reports as delivered by the browser back to your server according to your site's policy setup. They're sent back as a JSON string that is easily parsed and stored. The post shows you a sample database table structure (storing things like request, headers, blocked location and IP address) and the PHP to handle the incoming post. For more about the CSP reports, see Mozilla's example on their Developer section.

In this new tutorial from Tutorialzine.com, Martin Angelov shows you how to combine a bit of PHP, CSS3 and HTML to create a more functional "About" page for your site that shares contact information in multiple formats.

In this tutorial, we will be creating a simple about page that is powered by PHP, HTML5 and CSS3. It will present your contact information to your visitors, with an option for downloading it as a vCard (useful for importing it in third party applications). You can use today's example as a placeholder for your upcoming personal website, or as an actual about page.

He includes all of the code, markup and styling you'll need to get it put together. The PHP is used to store the contact details and, based on a flag in the GET request (easily modifiable to any other method, like a HTTP header) it returns the basic page, a JSON set or a vcard of the contact data. The page also includes spots for linking to Facebook and Twitter accounts.

If you've ever been to a conference and felt like they missed the target on the topics you wanted to see, Kevin Schroeder, an organizer for this year's Zend/PHP Conference, is asking for feedback from the community as to what they want to see at this year's event.

The primary responsibility I have, as being in charge of content is making sure that, well, we have good content. [...] While ZendCon may have the Zend name in it, it is the conference attendees who determine its success. It is whether or not you, as an attendee, are satisfied which determines my success in determining content. That said, I would like your input on what types of topics YOU would like to see. So if you have an opinion on what would make ZendCon compelling for you please leave a comment.

You can voice your opinion by leaving your comment on his post. There's already some good suggestions and lists for several hot topics around the community right now including deployment practices and community-oriented sessions. The date and the location for this year's event have not been released yet.

On IBM's developerWorks there's a recent article from Vikram Vaswani about using the oEmbed tool to pull content into your site from sources like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

If you have your photos in Flickr, your videos in YouTube, and your TV shows in Hulu, how do you bring them all into your blog posts on Blogger? Of course, you can do this by hyperlinking to the appropriate content, but wouldn't it be nicer if you could just embed them into your post at the appropriate place? Enter oEmbed.

He gives examples showing how to pull in content from a few different places - a video from YouTube, one from Revision3 and an image from deviantART. He also talks about using the oohEmbed service to access additional content on things like Wikipedia, Slideshare and Amazon. There's also a bit at the end looking at an alternative PHP library that could be used to do similar things, php-oembed.

On AppStorm.net there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to use the PyroCMS content management system (CodeIgniter-based) to set up a simple and easy content repository.

With a really nifty content-management system called PyroCMS, this needn't be something to worry about. In this article, I'll be showing you how to get PyroCMS installed on a LAMP web server and the basics of creating content and working with the highly-extensible system it offers.

They start with an overview of what PyroCMS is and some of the requirements you'll need to get it up and running. They walk you through the installation process including the database, server checks and permissions needs. They also help you customize it a bit for your site and set up some basic sample content.