Write a blog post: Check

So this is the second day in a row that I've explicitly taken 10 minutes to write out a to do list for the day. 10 minutes is the max. If I make it that long and am still writing things out, tough. On today's list was write a blog post which was positioned after responding to a bunch of emails. Responded to those messages, now time for the blog post.

First off, if you're wanting to keep tabs on me, my FriendFeed is about the best way to do it. I've almost created an app to do exactly what FriendFeed does. I resisted joining FF when I first saw it because I wanted to do it myself. Pragmatism finally won out though and I just signed up.

php|tek was a blast. All of the presentations I attended were interesting, though sadly there was no PHPT presentations *cough* *cough*... ;-) Next time I guess. The other presentations that were missing were talks on distributed data. Everyone's talking about federated data being the only way to scale to the size of Tagged or Facebook or Digg, but no one was talking about how to do that practically. I may take up the torch and see what I can put together on the topic if someone else doesn't do it first.

One thing that the conference did help with was my view of the state of PHP. If one thing is going to save PHP from becoming the next Java (i.e., the language you make your living in but not the one you play with), it's the community. There's lots of cool projects in the works, and lots of great people working on them.

I announced that I am running for the PEAR Group to help shepherd the userland side of the community. This next year I hope to get PEAR2 off of the ground and start getting greater community and business involvement in PEAR. PEAR has some legacy cruft in the way it names packages and such that really make it hard to integrate PEAR1 code into an existing project. Hopefully we can make PEAR2 easier to embed.

I plan on trying to get some sort of regular updates back on the blog. In the meantime, my twitter account is updated pretty regularly.