Sometimes a little (external) testing of your website is in order and Gagan Chhatwal has posted his list of ten tools you can use to check everything from how much load the site can take to what can be done to optimize the load time.

When maintaining or running a website , Webmasters need to keep in mind that one of the pertinent issues they will need to focus on is :Website Testing, which is not only vital for the website itself but for the user as well and one should not overlook its importance. [We have] collected some vital and free website testing tools which will help Webmasters in testing their sites thus saving users to conduct time consuming needless searches in finding the best resources pertaining to Web related tools and info.

Among the tools on the list are services like:

• Load Impact
• Browser Mob
• Host Tracker
• Built With
• CSE HTML validator

Most of these resources are free services, if not then they have a trial where you can see if it's a good fit.

As a part of his work for the WinPHP Challenge Juozas Kaziukenas looks at some of the external library types that you can use with your (Windows) PHP applications.

External libraries are useful for performance demanding tasks where PHP is simply too slow. Also PHP can work as front-end system for various back-end systems (where server doesn't provide any PHP supported communication types). I have written some posts about using .Net libraries in PHP so far, but there are some other choices available too.

He looks at the three types of library choices - PHP extensions, exec call. For what he wants to do, though, the COM objects are the best fit for the job.

On the CSS-Tricks.com site today there's a quick tutorial on changing up the look and feel of your site based on an external source. More specifically, they give the example of updating the graphics of your site depending on the weather in your area via PHP and CSS.

Using a little magic and trickery (read: PHP and CSS), we can change the appearance of a website automatically based on the weather outside, in real time! In the example site we have created, the header graphic will change to one of four different styles based on Sunny, Rain, Snow, and Cloudy.

Their example makes a request to the Yahoo! weather data for a location and brings it in to PHP where the XML is parsed (via a regular expression) and the current conditions are parsed out. This condition is then passed out into the page as the class type on the header and, based on the CSS already defined, the correct image is pulled in as the background.

PHPBuilder.com has posted a list of resources that they offer to help both beginning and experienced PHP developers to further their knowledge:

PHP is one of the most popular scripting languages used to develop applications on the web today. As a result, internet.com has a multitude of PHP resources throughout our network of websites. Here are some of our best PHP resources, along with some featured tutorials and out-of-network resources that you may not know about.

The grouping of links also include external resources like the main PHP site and Zend's website.

In this new post to the Stubbles blog Frank Kleine looks at the current state of annotations in the PHP language and applications.

Annotations are a really helpful feature in present-day development. An annotation is a special form of syntactic metadata that can be added to source code elements such as classes, methods, properties and parameters. They do not affect the program semantic directly, but can be used by tools and libraries to handle such annotated code in a certain way.

He notes that, as of right now, PHP doesn't naively support anything like this but that there are additional libraries that can be used to augment the standard PHP performance and use them (like a feature in PHPUnit with @assert and @test). He also go through several of the other libraries that make it possible including Addendum, FLOW3 and the XP-Framework.

In this post on the Dokeos blog, there's a comparison of the mbstring function and the iconv library as it pertains to their use on multi-byte strings.

I was wondering today why use mbstring rather than iconv in Dokeos, and honestly I didn't remember exactly why I had chosen mbstring in the past, but finding information about the *differences* between the two. [...] Searching a bit more, I found a PPT presentation from Carlos Hoyos on Google.

Essentially, it boils down to how the library is integrated - mbstring is bundled and iconv is pulled from an external source. So, if you're looking for maximum portability, he recommends mbstring.

On the Stubbles blog, Frank Kleine offers some advice to developers looking to use the Reflection API - "don't trust it".

If you try to get informations about parameters from methods of internal classes - forget that. Examining several internal classes my key findings are: either there is no information about parameters available and the reflection API says the method does not have any parameters, or the information about the parameter is wrong.

He includes code examples along side the output from the script to illustrate his point.

With all of the good news they've posted about the mysqlnd driver, the developers behind the Internet Super Hero blog know that there will be bugs that come up in the driver. So, they've addressed the right way to find and deal with these issues in a new blog entry.

he bad news: mysqlnd might have bugs. How to report and debug these bugs - using mysqli_debug() - is subject of this posting.

They step you through the process for finding out what's causing the problems (internal versus external debugging) and how to make client traces with the mysqi extension to make it even easier for the developers to track down the problem. They also suggest a few things to send along with your bug report - like the PHP code calling it or the SQL you're using to select/update/insert/delete the data from your database.

Jacek Artymiak published the second edition of his "Dynamic Bitmap Graphics with PHP and GD" tutorial over on DevGuide.net today focusing specifically on creating bitmaps on the fly.

The 39 page guide ($15 USD from Lulu.com) provides a wealth of knowledge about working with graphics in PHP including a detailed look at some of the more advanced functionality of GD. The book covers your first steps with GD and graphics, working with primitives, creating an image based on external data, and embedding them into an XHTML/HTML page of your choosing.

The page for the book on DevGuide.net itself even provides a great list of resources for those looking to get into graphics with PHP - with links to everything from the basic software (webservers, PHP, etc) out to the libraries you'll need and some other tutorials to help you even after you've worked through the book.

Elizabeth Smith has a new post to her blog today covering some of the fun she's been having with compiling things like Gtk+ and PHP-Gtk2.

So I've been using microsoft visual studio (actually it's Visual C++ Express, but uses the same stuff behind the scenes) to work on getting things compiled on windows. PHP-Gtk2 allows for some nifty extensions, well at least on linux. So I've been working to get versions of libglade, scintilla, gtksourceview and mozembed working on windows. It's a long, slow process. Here's the deal so far.

She talks about her current situation (what's compiling and what's not) and the software that she's trying to get up and running. She also mentions a problem she's been having with an error message talking about "unresolved external symbols" she'll need to track down (or get some help on - anyone out there seen it?)