A pretty cool project in PHP - Memproxy is a caching proxy “server” that uses memcached for storing the cache. This project uses PHP scripts to handle caching using memcache. Key features of the MemProxy are:
Uses memcached for storage
Serves cache headers to clients based on TTL of cached data
Uses custom headers to assemble multiple pieces of cache into one object
Minimal dependencies. Only PHP and pecl/memcached needed.
Small code base. It is just two files, one when settings are cached.
Application agnostic. If the backend is hosted on an HTTP server this can cache it.
Here’s a chance for all you bloggers to win a Bag Full of Market Leverage Goodies from John Chow’s Blog. Details on how to enter are published in his contest post. The bag full of goodies consists of the following:
Flip video camera
$200 Market Leverage Amex Rewards card
USB drive that is also a pen
iPod Nano
All this in a Nike bag with more goodies like a Jacket, cap, tee-shirt and a golf shirt
I just came across this cool article which shows you how to use Excel to run the business logic of a PHP application. Maarten shows you how to use Excel to calculate the cost of a Car and get these results to show in PHP using the PHPExcel library. Under the covers, the Excel formula is parsed into the corresponding PHP code and excuted.
Here’s a scenario: You are working in a company which sells “dream cars”. For every model, the company has created an Excel spreadsheet which is used to calculate the car’s price based on customer preferences. These spreadsheets are updated frequently in order to reflect the car manufacturer’s pricing schemes.
Your manager asks you to create a small website which accepts some input fields (Does the customer want automatic transmission? What colour should the car be painted? Does the customer want leather seats? Does the customer want sports suspension?). Based on these questions, the car’s price should be calculated. Make sure all prices on the website are in sync with this Excel sheet!
Woopra is an excellent service which is currently in Beta phase. This service gives you a cool analytic engine for your sites with a desktop interface. You can see live hits, geo reports and also allows you to start a chat with the visitors on your sites. This is a really cool feature which allows you to interact with your visitors to improve your site’s interactivity.
Once you sign up and submit your sites you’ll get the javascipt snippets which you have to embed on your pages. You’ll need to get java installed on your PC to get the Woopra desktop app running. Once you’ve installed the app and the JS code on your sites, you’re all set to monitor your site stats live ! This service really kicks Google Analytics where it really hurts!
You can see all your online visitors and in the Live menu and start a chat with any one of the visitors online. There is a wordpress plugin which also tags the user by their name and details which they submitted when they posted a comment on your blog. This helps you identify repeat visitors easily.
Twitbin’s a cool addon for Firefox which allows you to follow you friend’s tweets and send your own tweets. It shows up as a sidebar on the browser. The latest version of Twitbin works on Firefox 3 RC1.
All you need to do is to install the addon, open the sidebar, login by clicking on the Home icon in the sidebar and you’re all set.
Just got the latest firmware update for the N82 yesterday. The new update seems to have improved the stability of my mobile, it used to restart randomly when it was connected to Truphone over Wifi. The firmware update seems to have solved this issue. Other cool features in the new update are:
Firefox 3 seems to have stabilized, and is ready for the masses to test it out. The final version should be out by June according to this news report from Reuters:
“The program’s creators told Reuters on Thursday that the privately-held company’s trial version of Firefox 3 browser is ready for the masses to use after months of development.
Engineers at Mozilla are still putting the finishing touches on the software and hope to release the final version of Firefox 3 by the end of June, Schroepfer said.”
Here’s a cool wordpress plugin which updates your twitter account whenever you create or update a post on your Wordpress blog. You can configure the plugin to send a twitter when you - create or edit a new draft, publish your post or edit any old posts.
