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Will in Print

Lynn Wallenstein — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:03:34 +0000

Congrats to fellow PBG “member” Will Harris for the publication of Head First’s PHP & MySQL in which he was a technical editor.

If you’re ready to create web pages more complex than those you can build with HTML and CSS, Head First PHP & MySQL is the ultimate learning guide to building dynamic, database-driven websites using PHP and MySQL. Packed with real-world examples, this book teaches you all the essentials of server-side programming, from the fundamentals of PHP and MySQL coding to advanced topics such as form validation, session IDs, cookies, database queries and joins, file I/O operations, content management, and more.

Head First PHP & MySQL offers the same visually rich format that’s turned every title in the Head First series into a bestseller, with plenty of exercises, quizzes, puzzles, and other interactive features to help you retain what you’ve learned.

Great job Will! There is even a PBG name drop!

Bad at Updating

Lynn Wallenstein — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:49:13 +0000

We are really bad about updating this blog :(

Unfortunately I don’t see this process changing anytime soon, but do know that we all blog regularly on our own blogs:

Lynn Wallenstein – http://www.maverickconceptions.com
Dan Ahern – http://www.danahern.com
Will Harris – http://www.dbawill.org
Michael Harper – http://www.redjac.net

and have been busy busy busy releasing a lot of new software:

I Heart Games – http://www.iheartgamesapp.com
Playericious – http://www.playericious.com
LockURL – http://www.lockurl.com
Environs – http://apps.facebook.com/environs
Truth – http://apps.facebook.com/truth

and some open source as well

Embark – http://github.com/lwallenstein/embark/tree/master
Start Me Up – http://github.com/lwallenstein/start-me-up/tree/master

We will be rolling out a new PBG site soon that is more blog focused so look forward to some exciting things including a reincarnation of iStalkr and a bunch more web apps and open source!

Dan on Rails: Part Three

Lynn Wallenstein — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:33:50 +0000

Ok, now he is really showing us up:

Beginner mistake number 3:
Associations. If you’ve worked with relational databases at all you probably know the concepts one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many, and you’ve probably cried your self to sleep on a numerous occasions writing join statements that probably are longer than some children’s books. Every Rails developers learns the basics of Rail’s model associations.

Click here for the full article.

Dan on Rails: Part Two

Lynn Wallenstein — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:30:55 +0000

In Dan’s successful attempt to outshine all the other PBG bloggers, may we present “Trial By Fire – Part 2” Dan’s latest installment on moving to rails.

Click here for the full article

Dan on Rails

Lynn Wallenstein — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 07:48:35 +0000

In an attempt to keep up with Will, Dan has started a series of articles outlining the things he “wish he knew when he was starting with rails”. Good read for anyone making the jump:

Starting off as a Rails developer I ran into some problems coming from a Java/C++ background. Until Rails I more learned the languages for fun and something to play with in my free time, however by doing this I picked up some bad habits. I’ve worked with one of the top Ruby developers out there and learned to mimic his style and question his choices in code. I’ve learned a lot in the last year and a half I’ve been coding and now am even leading up a development team and teaching them the ins and the outs of Ruby.

Click Here for the full article.

More MySQL: Full Text Indexing and RSS Feeds

Lynn Wallenstein — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 07:43:43 +0000

Will posted a new article over on his blog in his continuing effort to outshine us all:

Full text indexing is an amazing feature. Instead of incredibly costly LIKE comparisons, an index can be created by the RDBMS which contains the full text of the column, or table, in question. For things like e-mail message bodies, biographies or other lengthy descriptions, or any other unstructured text, full text indexing is the only solution that makes sense.

For the full article, click here.

Will on Backups

Lynn Wallenstein — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 07:27:13 +0000

So to show us all up, Will has hit the ground running with a blog post about MySQL backups:

So my first project with PBG is to get a more automated backup system going. I find out that they’re basically using cpanel and other variants to do manual backups on development projects. This works well, but it takes a lot of time, and you have to do it every day. Computers were designed to solve these kinds of problems…in fact, I hope that some day software can solve ALL of my problems, leaving me with nothing else in my life but blogging about the accomplishments of my software like the lady next door does with her kid. Unfortunately, that day is not here yet, so I’m still forced to do at least SOME work.

Click here for the whole article.

Welcoming Will

Lynn Wallenstein — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 23:04:46 +0000

Powered By Geek is happy to welcome William Harris to the team. Will has been working with our team unofficially answering SQL questions that stump us and attempting to enforce best practices in our projects. Now in a more official role, Will is going to be our “SQL” guy.

Welcome Will … our databases thank you.

PBG Wallpapers

Lynn Wallenstein — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 05:22:50 +0000

Why? Why Not!

Why haven’t you guys posted in, like, forever?

mharper — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:56:13 +0000

Good question. It’s because we’ve been scouring our respective metropolitan areas for every last cup of coffee to keep us awake long enough to give you iStalkr. Basically, here’s what it does: you generate a lot of RSS. Your flickr page, your twitter page, your last.fm, your own blog… they all generate RSS feeds. These feeds all live in different places. So we pull them together into a single page so instead of telling the story of your music, or your thoughts, or your photos… we just tell the story of you. We think it’s a pretty cool idea, and we hope you do, too. Please feel free to tell us what you think and how you’d like it to be improved… we’re not going to stop until iStalkr is the web-two-dot-oh-iest site on the Internet. That’s right, the entire Internet. Which brings me to my final point: yes, we know how to spell the word “stalker.” We’re not google, after all. We dropped the “e” intentionally. It’s a joke, people.