Twitter

On the world wide web, new sites appear quickly and often solve a problem. Twitter is one such website, which at first i didnt ‘get’ but now i do. So i have set up my account at twitter.com/Londiniumcom and started to add friends and other people and topics to my account.

Looks interesting as another news feed, source of info about what is happening.

Going to look for ways to integrate my twitter account with php with codeigniter and see what is available

Open Source Codeigniter Directory System launched

We have now launched the first version of an Open Source Website Directory System.

To find out more visit:

http://code.google.com/p/londinium/

and also come IRC Channel to #londinium on irc.freenode.net to chat to the development team and discuss this system.

Cross Browser testing

The history of browsers is a long and windy road. To easily see what a site looks like i like to use these 3 tools

http://browsershots.org/Lots of browsers, but takes some time

http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer – for different versions of ie

http://www.browsrcamp.com/ -  to test mac os x Safari

New londinium.com re-launched!!!

After many months of work, we are proud t0 have the new londinium.com website live with a whole new structure and framework.

We would like to hear your feedback about what you think of the new site structure, css and look.

More soon…

new IRC channel for londinium

To help keep in contact with the londinium users, we have created a chatroom on IRC (Internet Relay Chat)

irc://irc.freenode.net/londinium

Server: irc.freenode.net

Channel: #londinium

To access this chat room, you will need an IRC client such as mIrc for Windows and Colloquy for Mac OS X.

We look forward to seeing you there.

new PHP frameworks to look at

Yii is a new PHP framework and so is Kohana

in fact here is a website dedicated to php frameworks – http://www.phpframeworks.com/

Wordpress 2.7

Have launched a new events diary today with the very neat looking wordpress 2.7, which is a lot nicer to work with than the older version.

have also found some new themes to use for the blogs which are equally neat

Wordpress 2.7

Librio Theme as used in www.phplondinium.com

php website links

stackoverflow.com

hudzilla.org

Speed up PHP (Advanced)

OP Code Caching

When you excute a php script it has to be compiled and run. If you install a PHP OP Code cache, the code is stored in it’s compiled state so compiling is then skipped for the next page request. This is particularly useful if you have a PHP script that does a lot of calculations or loops.

Speed improvements can range from 40% to over 150%. Installing one is easy so it should be a feature which is used by all PHP programmers.

Here are some of the current contenders that may be of interest : eAccelerator, X-Cache, MemCache, APC

Database Caching

The products above store the compiled state of the PHP, but this does not help us if we have a slow database query. To combat this we store the database results into a file on the local system and call it instead of the database. To make sure the content gets appropriately updated the cache should be regenerate often.

Here is a pseudo code example:

retrieve cache item

if cache item doesn’t exist then

load database results

store cache item

endif

use cache item

You can also check to see how old the cache is : ex : 30 minutes and have it regenerate automatically.

2 Servers are Better than 1

Usually on a web host you will have 1 server processing all the requests (typically Apache). A good way to optimise the setup is a to add an additional “lighter” server to handle requests for static files like : images, javascript, etc … then leave all the heavy requests (parsing of PHP files) to Apache. Now that Apache doesn’t have to waste resourcing on images and other files it will have more resources available for processing.

Other Items of Interest

jMeter – Apache benchmarking tool that records user movement and replicates it.

nGinx – A high performance web server.

Image compression

Found a new tool to compress images online

smushit.com