A recent conversation with a Zend employee revealed some good news for PHP and Google App Engine...

I have been writing this blog for a bit over a month now and I thought that it would be good to get some feedback from the site’s readers - i.e. you folks!

In-function caching can be used to greatly improve the performance of our software. Applying this technique effectively is important to avoid spiraling memory usage and bizarre bugs that can be caused by old cache data lingering around.

One of the things that has been skulking around my todo list for some time now has been to start using FeedBurner to track subscriber statistics. I only have a very vague concept of how many people subscribe to this blog and it would be great to get a more accurate idea.

Save yourself time, effort and headaches by employing the debugging techniques discussed in this article. I cover topics from enabling notices to writing Unit Tests, as well as some ideas you may not have thought of...

FOWD 2008 is now over, the contacts have been contacted and the meetings made (well, planned, but it sounded better my way). I am now sitting back after eight hours of emailing and phoning current clients, potential clients and other freelances. Oh, and I brought a really sweet new mic, but more on that later...

As you probably know, Google has just launched App Engine, a hosted application development platform that sits upon Google's vast infrastructure. Read on to find out more about App Engine, and then head over to appengine.google.com to get started!

This post gives an introduction to the complications that can arise from deploying your PHP applications onto a load balanced web hosting platform. This is a must-read article if you are planning to develop large scale web applications, or if your software will be deployed on a large range of platforms (as is the case for many open source projects).

This article examines how PHP handles passing of variables internally, as well as how this relates to memory usage. This information is very useful for any professional PHP developer as it shows how passing variables by reference will normally result in more (not less) memory being used.

This short post provides you with a table for converting postcodes into counties. I created the table from a variety of sources for a recent project where I needed to be able to map user's postcodes to counties.

In this blog post I cover a problem which I feel is faced by many freelancers when they first start out – that of finding themselves stuck in the same building 24 hours a day.

This post concludes the 'Fuzzy Searching in PHP' two part series. It explains how you can use the indexed data from part one to actually perform searches, and discusses some of that ways the indexing and searching system could be improved.

In this blog post I will be discussing how you can create a fuzzy text search using PHP and a relational database. I will be using the example of a wiki application, but the concepts can easily be applied to other applications in different languages.

Hi, and welcome to the new Port Eighty Eight blog! In the coming weeks you will be seeing a number of new posts covering general aspects of web development as well as my thoughts on being self employed in the IT industry. If you have any thoughts or suggestions please post a comment at the bottom of the page and I will be sure to get back to you!