http://www.nickawilliams.com For everything Nick! Mon, 22 Dec 2008 03:40:11 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Today marks the first day Stack Overflow opens its doors to the public. In case you're not in the know, Stack Overflow is essentially a Q&A site geared towards developers of all kinds. It takes a language/technology agnostic approach and simply provides a framework within which the community can ask ... http://www.nickawilliams.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-liftoff/ Today I discovered a very powerful addition to the PHP world. Phar is an archive extension for PHP that allows an entire PHP application to be packaged into a single file. It's basically PHP's answer to Java's .jar archive format. Don't get excited yet, it gets better . . . There ... http://www.nickawilliams.com/2008/09/04/the-new-phar-php-package/ As mobile access to the web increases, it is becoming more and more important to ensure sites are usable on mobile devices. iPhoney attempts to address the iPhone camp with a desktop application that renders web pages within a virtual iPhone. After playing around with the app, it is certainly not ... http://www.nickawilliams.com/2008/08/25/iphoney-a-handy-pair-of-iphone-goggles/ Having recently discovered the plethora of coding fonts available online, it occurred to me that quite a bit of thought has been put into something I have always seen as rather trivial. The more I read about it, the more I have come to realize that using a font specifically ... http://www.nickawilliams.com/2008/07/10/coding-fonts/ That's right, you heard me! It's all thanks to a fantastic project called Phalanger, which adds a super-fast execution environment for a very large portion of the PHP scripting language. Certainly this was only a matter of time, combining one of the most popular open-source languages of the web with ... http://www.nickawilliams.com/2008/06/16/write-net-applications-in-php/ During my morning blog-scan I came across four videos that really set my day off on the right foot. And that song! Oh that song! As much as I can't stand it, I'll be humming it all afternoon today. If you're familiar with the MVC model, then these videos were ... http://www.nickawilliams.com/2008/06/05/m-is-for-model-v-is-for-view/ I recently had the opportunity to work with one of Google's latest search applances, the Mini. Having no previous experience with any of Google's search hardware, this seems an excellent opportunity to offer a newcomer's first impressions. I. Setup & Configuration Setting things up turned out to be more painless than I ... http://www.nickawilliams.com/2008/06/04/googles-search-appliance/ gotAPI.com is one of the most useful online resources I've come across, primarily because it places resources spread all over the internet into one simple site. I've been using this for quite some time, and have for the most part I have taken its usefulness for granted. Then it occurred ... http://www.nickawilliams.com/2008/03/31/an-api-reference-does-a-methods-body-good/ I stumbled upon a fantastic PHP class today and felt compelled to comment on it. Originally written by Tyler Hall, this class allows you to send notifications to any system running Growl from a PHP script. For those of you that don't know, Growl is an application written for Mac ... http://www.nickawilliams.com/2008/03/26/make-php-growl/ The evolution of PHP into an object-oriented programming language has been a very exciting process to watch. I'll admit its advancement seems to move at a glacial pace at times, but looking back we certainly have come a long way. With the release of 5.0 we saw PHP leave its ... http://www.nickawilliams.com/2008/03/12/php-53-a-heavy-hitter-in-training/