Category Archives: php

Plugins for the brain – WordCamp Atlanta 2010

I'm going to WordCamp Atlanta!

Well I had a fun time last night at the kick-off of Atlanta WordCamp held over at SCAD’s Atlanta campus. Saw a lot of great folks from the Atlanta web/social media scene and a bunch of Twitter friends. It was great to see Amani Channel of Visual Eye Media running a session. However, my favorite session from last night was Topher Kohan‘s talk on SEO tips for WordPress. He’s a big advocate for many of the plugins offered by Yoast so I’ll have to check some of those out. He also stirred up a smidgen of controversy over the merits of the Thesis theme/framework.

Today there are a lot of appetizing sessions on the menu. I’m torn between attending Rusty Tanton‘s analytics integration discussion or Ryan Imel‘s talk on parent/child theming. In the afternoon I think I’ll stick mostly to the developer track until the last slot where it is going to be another coin toss between Dave Coustan‘s content strategy discussion and Tessa Horehled‘s "Making your blog your business: Scale & Monetization"

There’s a lot of other great stuff so it was tough to choose. If you’re there today, I hope you’ll please find me and say hello. 🙂

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Live from Barcamp – Day 2 – Session 4 [for me] Ruby on Rails panel

Looks like just two panelists.  Didn’t get the names.

Starting discussion with scaling issues of mongrel server.  I was expecting more of a discussion of rails, pros and cons, this seems to be more of a discussion of memory use on the server and scalability.  Database load failed to scale for Twitter, sooner than the ability to run enoug instances of mongrel.  Logan, jumps in and interjects “F*ck scalability”  with the contention that when you have the problem of scalability you better have money coming in and can then deal with the issue.   Is Ruby creating a brain-drain on Java talent.  Still more jobs for java developers?   There is a rebutting point that sometimes an app can catch fire before monetization and can outpace the scalability of Rails.  PHP might be better.  But how do you anticipate rate of acceptance, and usage growth?  In one company, not named, prototyping is done in rails, but all that code is tossed for the production environment. The prototyping is useful for creating real requirements, but in the company referred to it is all java for the production.

Lookup: panelist mentioned a video on building a blog app in rails in 15 minutes – assume this can be found on youtube

Panelist expresses difficulty in his experience getting separate rails apps to communicate well.  Not well-suited task for rails.  Application growth tends to get unmanageable.  Not just a rails problem.  Michael chimes in with a plug for Ruby and reinforcing the point that Rails is not very ruby-like.  Learning and loving Ruby can enrich the experience and open new doors.  Very expressive.  Syntax for ruby is very expressive.  Ruby is fully object-oriented.

Rails vs. Symfony — Symfony is a framework for php that borrows much from rails — panelists likes rails much better — more nuance, better unit testing.  Other frameworks, like Zend, etc.  don’t provide the full simplicity, but they do help put you in a better paradigm for development.

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