According to this post over on the C7Y site (php|architect's community site), their php|tek 2008 conference has already reached the forty percent sold mark on seats for the event.

Seat sales for our php|tek 2008 conference, which will take place in Chicago, IL, between May 20th and 23rd, are starting to pick up, and over 40% of all available spots have already been reserved.

You can signup on their conference website as well as get all of the details on the four day event including the speaker schedule, hotel and travel information - even a Boss Help section to help with convincing your local PHB.

From the NewsForge site, there's this new tutorial that shares how you can develop some simple PHP scripts and, with the help of SQLite, "exploit" the Amazone Web Services.

A few weeks ago a friend asked me how my book, Pro OpenSSH, was selling on Amazon.com. I was tracking the sales by going to Amazon.com and viewing the book page to examine the sales rank. The only data displayed about history information was today's Sales Rank and Yesterday's Sales Rank, which isn't all that helpful. I decided to use PHP, SQLite, and the Amazon Web Services API to gather more useful data.

I thought it would be fun to track the sales rank over a period of time, then display a graph of the sales rank over time on a Web page.

He shows how, via the REST web service Amazon offers, he created a simple PHP5 script to grab the resulting XML, parse out the sales rank for his book, and drop it into a SQLite database. He chooses to go with the SimpleXML package for the parsing.

All of the code is laid out in the tutorial, including some to use the Image::Graph package in PEAR to render a simple line graph of the fetched information.

[digg it]