It’s a Chrome extension which lets you see your server side logs right in the browser. There are currently libraries for:

• Python
• Ruby
• PHP
• Express

Is your server side language/environment of choice not on that list? Don’t worry, Chrome Logger uses an open and published protocol so you can easily write client libraries of your own!

See the project’s home page for more info or check under the hood if you’re curious about how it all works.

The post Bring your server side debug logging into the browser with Chrome Logger appeared first on The Changelog.

$headers = array('Accept' => 'application/json');
$options = array('auth' => array('user', 'pass'));
$request = Requests::get('https://api.github.com/gists', $headers, $options);

var_dump($request->status_code);
// int(200)

var_dump($request->headers['content-type']);
// string(31) "application/json; charset=utf-8"

var_dump($request->body);
// string(26891) "[...]"

I’ve written about my thoughts on what makes a good API wrapper and libraries like these that provide a more idiomatic experience are just great.

Grab Requests on GitHub.

The post Requests – HTTP library for PHP appeared first on The Changelog.

<?php

$imagine = new ImagineGdImagine();
// or
$imagine = new ImagineImagickImagine();
// or
$imagine = new ImagineGmagickImagine();

$size    = new ImagineImageBox(40, 40);

$mode    = ImagineImageImageInterface::THUMBNAIL_INSET;
// or
$mode    = ImagineImageImageInterface::THUMBNAIL_OUTBOUND;

$imagine->open('/path/to/large_image.jpg')
    ->thumbnail($size, $mode)
    ->save('/path/to/thumbnail.png')
;

Check out the extremely detailed project docs and examples for advanced usage.

The post Imagine – Unified PHP 5.3 API for GD2, ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick appeared first on The Changelog.

Items mentioned in the show:

• J Chris Anderson is a Couchbase cofounder, Mobile Architect, CouchDB committer, new dad
• The CouchDB music video (served up from CouchDB no less)
• Chris sings the official CouchDB theme song to kick off Episode 0.1.8
• Apache CouchDb is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API.
• Damien Katz is the creator of CouchDB.
• CouchBase was formed from merging Membase and CouchOne
• Chris is one of the rare CFOs with a GitHub account
• CouchBase makes the case for NoSQL
• Membase Server currently uses Sqlite under the hood, but will be swapped out for Couch’s storage engine soon
• Mobile Couchbase runs on iOS and brings Couch to your mobile device
• CouchApps are JavaScript and HTML5 applications served directly from CouchDB.
• Zynga makers of Farmville use Membase
• The CouchApp toolkit is now maintained by Benoît Chesneau
• Aaron Miller led the charge to get Erlang on iOS, changing dynamic linking to static linking.
• SpiderMonkey was included iOS for CouchMobile and its JIT compiler made it preferable to V8 or Nitro for Couch tasks.
• GeoCouch adds geospatial features to CouchDB
• Chris outlines the distinctives for Couch’s incremental Map/Reduce
• Jason Smith in Thailand keeps the lights on for CouchBase hosting solutions
• Cloudant offers hosting for Couch in the cloud
• Wynn wants to see integration for CouchBase and Appcelerator Titanium
• Todd Anderson has a great tutorial on using jQuery mobile and CouchDB
• Damien Katz is Chris’ programming hero
• Chris says working with Jan Lehnardt is a blast
• Be sure and check out CouchDB – The Definitive Guide by Chris, Jan, and Noah

The post Episode 0.5.4 – CouchBase, Erlang, and Mergers with J Chris Anderson appeared first on The Changelog.

I was excited when I stumbled across a couple of projects by Devin Price that let you easily expose an options panel for your theme. Thematic Options (and the non-Thematic Options Framework) make it easy to add an options panel for your theme settings, letting your end users customize your theme in the WordPress admin panel.

Options are declared in a PHP array, as in this example:

// Set the Options Array
global $my_options;
$my_options = array();

$my_options[] = array( "name" => "General Settings",
                    "type" => "heading");

$my_options[] = array( "name" => "Custom Logo",
          "desc" => "Upload a logo for your theme, or specify the image address of your online logo. (http://yoursite.com/logo.png)",
          "id" => "logo",
          "std" => "",
          "type" => "upload");

$url =  ADMIN . 'images/';
$my_options[] = array( "name" => "Main Layout",
          "desc" => "Select main content and sidebar alignment. Choose between 1, 2 or 3 column layout.",
          "id" => "layout",
          "std" => "2c-l-fixed.css",
          "type" => "images",
          "options" => array(
            '1col-fixed.css' => $url . '1col.png',
            '2c-r-fixed.css' => $url . '2cr.png',
            '2c-l-fixed.css' => $url . '2cl.png',
            '3c-fixed.css' => $url . '3cm.png',
            '3c-r-fixed.css' => $url . '3cr.png')
          );
$my_options[] = array( "name" => "Custom Favicon",
          "desc" => "Upload a 16px x 16px Png/Gif image that will represent your website's favicon.",
          "id" => "custom_favicon",
          "std" => "",
          "type" => "upload"); 

$my_options[] = array( "name" => "Tracking Code",
          "desc" => "Paste your Google Analytics (or other) tracking code here. This will be added into the footer template of your theme.",
          "id" => "google_analytics",
          "std" => "",
          "type" => "textarea");

...

Devin has a nice blog post with more info including how to use these values in your theme, along with an introductory screencast.

[Source on GitHub]

The post Options-Framework: Expose an options panel for your Thematic WordPress themes appeared first on The Changelog.

Validation is billed as “the most awesome validation engine ever created for PHP.” While that might be the epitome of hyperbole, it is indeed nifty. Validation includes more than 30 chainable validators supporting composite validation of nested, grouped, and related rules.

Let’s look at a simple example:

use RespectValidationValidator as v;
v::numeric()->validate($someNumber); //returns true or false 

We did mention chaning, right?

//From 1 to 15 non-whitespace alphanumeric characters 
$username = 'alganet';
$validUsername = v::alnum()
                  ->noWhitespace()
                  ->length(1,15)
                  ->validate($username);

Validators are also reusable:

$idValidator = v::int()->positive();
$idValidator->validate(123); //true
$idValidator->validate(456); //true

Be sure and check the Readme for advanced usage. Also be sure and check out Respect’s other projects including:

• Relational is a chainable abstraction for relational database queries
• Daemon is a library for managing daemon systems using PHP
• Stream is a lightweight, asynchronous, object-oriented layer for the great PHP stream API
• Env is a lightweight, transparent, testable and awesome environment wrapper for PHP

[Source on GitHub]

The post Respect, Validation for PHP developers appeared first on The Changelog.

Eric Mill recently made the code available to the public, along with the official Android and iPhone app repos on GitHub.

Make sure to submit your pull requests in time for next year!

[Source on GitHub] [Is it Christmas?]

The post Is it Christmas? appeared first on The Changelog.

tenderlove (Aaron Patterson)

The author of nokogiri and mechanize, Aaron also empowers you to do fuzzy texticle searches.

isaacs (Isaac Z. Schlueter)

The man who helps you manage your package using npm.

abraham (Abraham Williams)

The author of the canonical PHP library for the Twitter API and fun Chrome extensions, a cool dude who is master of his domain — name.

The post GitHub Follow Friday for 20101029 appeared first on The Changelog.

He also wrote modernizr-server – a way to bring Modernizr browser data to your server scripting environment. PHP is currently supported, and James intends to offer other server-side environments in the future, but that’s going to be based on demand!

We’ve covered Modernizr being used in other projects before. Modernizr is a great way to find out about your user’s browser capabilities. However, you can only access its API on the browser itself, which means you can’t easily benefit from knowing about browser capabilities in your server logic.

Progressive enhancement, media queries and body classes are fine for tweaking sites and their appearance. But for structural changes to sites and pages, sometimes it’s much simpler to just emit the right markup from the server in the first place.

The modernizr-server library is a way to bring Modernizr browser data to your server scripting environment. For example, in PHP:

<?php

    include('modernizr-server.php');

    print 'The server knows:';
    foreach($modernizr as $feature=>$value) {
        print "<br/> $feature: "; print_r($value);
    }

?>

The server knows:
canvas: 1
canvastext: 1
geolocation: 1
crosswindowmessaging: 1
websqldatabase: 1
indexeddb: 0
hashchange: 1
...

How it works

The first time the user accesses a page which includes the modernizr-server.php library, the library sends the Modernizr script to the client, with a small script added to the end. Modernizr runs as usual and populates the feature test results.

The small suffix script then serializes the results into a concise cookie, which is set on the client using Javascript. It then refreshes the page immediately.

This second time the PHP script is executed, the library takes the cookie and instantiates the server-side $modernizr object with its contents. If possible, this is placed in the PHP $_SESSION so that it can be quickly accessed in subsequent requests.

While either of the cookie or session remain active, no further execution of the Modernizr script will take place. If they both expire, the next request to a page containing modernizr-server.php will cause the browser to rerun the Modernizr tests again.

And also …

You might also want to read James’ blog post on Modernizr on the server-side.

Check out the codes

[Source on GitHub] & [Documentation]

The post modernizr-server: Modernizr on the server-side appeared first on The Changelog.

Heroku::Autoscale

David Dollar makes automatically scaling your Heroku dynos a snap with this gem. Simply add the gem to your Gemfile

gem 'heroku-autoscale'

and configure your Heroku credentials and the minimum and maximum numbers of dynos for your app in your rackup file

use Heroku::Autoscale,
  :username  => ENV["HEROKU_USERNAME"],
  :password  => ENV["HEROKU_PASSWORD"],
  :app_name  => ENV["HEROKU_APP_NAME"],
  :min_dynos => 2,
  :max_dynos => 5,
  :queue_wait_low  => 100,  # milliseconds
  :queue_wait_high => 5000, # milliseconds
  :min_frequency   => 10    # seconds

Now your app will scale up with traffic and down as traffic wanes.

Tempalias

Warning! This email address will self destruct. Perfect for media site content walls, contests, or auction transactions, Tempalias is powered by Node.js and lets you create email addresses with a built-in expiration using http://tempalias.com/ or hosted on own your own site.

Justin.tv’s Apple Push Notification Service gem

Send and read Apple Push Notifications from Ruby:

Jtv-apns is a gem for accessing the Apple Push Notification Service that allows
both sending notifications and reading from apple’s feedback service. This gem
is based heavily on the work of James Pozdena.

Tweetnest

Tweetnest is a PHP app to archive, browse, and search your tweets.

fugitive.vim

A nice Git wrapper for Vim:

View any blob, tree, commit, or tag in the repository with :Gedit (and
:Gsplit, :Gvsplit, :Gtabedit, …). Edit a file in the index and
write to it to stage the changes. Use :Gdiff to bring up the staged
version of the file side by side with the working tree version and use
Vim’s diff handling capabilities to stage a subset of the file’s
changes.

The post WatchWednesday for 20100929 appeared first on The Changelog.

Frank Sinatra was the Chairman of cool. Some fourteen years after his death, the crooner is still imitated.

Just like its namesake, Sinatra, the class Ruby web application DSL still inspires all sorts of projects from Sammy.js to Padrino to Denied.

Slim, a PHP5 project from Josh Lockhart is the latest project to cover the classics.

Setup

To get started, just require the script and call init

<?php
require('slim/Slim.php');
Slim::init();
?>

Routing

Slim supports the familiar Sinatra-style routes for all four HTTP verbs:

Slim::get('/books/:id', function ($id) {
    //Do something
});

Slim::post('/books', function () {
    //Do something
});

Slim::put('/books/:id', function ($id) {
    //Do something
});

Slim::delete('/books/:id', function ($id) {
    //Do something
});

Middleware and callbacks

Slim also allows you to run code before and after your actions:

Slim::before(function () {
    //Do something
});


Slim::after(function () {
    //Do something
});

Templating

Slim supports a variety of templates including Smarty and Twig.

[Source on GitHub] [Hompage]

The post Slim: A PHP5 Sinatra Clone appeared first on The Changelog.

Mentioned in the show:

• David Recordon Open Source developer at Facebook, co-creator of OAuth
• Paul Bucheit Co-founder of FriendFeed, creator of Gmail
• Haiping Zhao Creator of Hip-Hop at Facebook
• Scott MacVicar Developer on Hip-hop at Facebook
• Owen Yamauchi – Three20 developer at facebook
• Joe Hewitt Original Three20 developer, creator of Firebug
• Tornado – Non-blocking web server built in Python
• epoll – the Linux magic at the heart of Tornado
• EventMachine Ruby approach to evented, asynchronous web
• Node.js – You do listen to this show, right?
• Hip-hop PHP – Pre-compile your PHP into lightning fast C++
• Three20 – iPhone framework extracted from Facebook’s iPhone app
• iPhone OS 4.0 Next version of Apple’s mobile operating system
• OpenGraph Enables web sites to become rich objects in social graphs
• OAuth2 New simpler mobile and desktop-friendly version of everybody’s favorite authentication method
• f8 Facebook’s developer conference

The post Episode 0.2.4 – Facebook Open Source projects: Tornado, Hip-hop, and Three20 appeared first on The Changelog.

Snapbird lets you search someone’s timeline, favorites, or your own direct messages without the 7 day Twitter Search restriction. It even lets you permalink favorite queries.

Snapbird also uses Twitterlib, Remy’s JavaScript Twitter API wrapper.

Snapbird is open source so you can either use the hosted version or fork the project and run your own.

[Source on GitHub] [Homepage]

The post Snapbird – Twitter search on steroids appeared first on The Changelog.

Automation Ahoy!

Phake supports task grouping, before/after blocks, and task descriptions. Requires PHP >= 5.3 (for closures).

Here’s a simple task definiton:

task('dependency1', function() {
      echo "i will run first!n";
});

task('dependency2', function() {
  echo "i will run second!n";
});

task('task_name', 'dependency1', dependency2', function() {
      echo "i will run last!n";
});

And to run the task, simply:

./phake task_name

[Source on GitHub]

The post Phake: M/Rake for PHP appeared first on The Changelog.

Aaron Collegeman’s CoreyLib library is an incredibly simple universal API wrapper with caching built in.

It can handle most modern APIs with full XML, JSON, authentication, parameterization, xmlNode, and Xpath support. All requests can be cached in MySql and parsed at a custom interval to dramatically improve page rendering speed. It’s available as a zero-config WordPress plugin too.

Here’s all the code needed to get the latest 5 tweets from twitter:

[Source on GitHub] [Documentation]

Submitted by: Kenneth Reitz: Passionate open source web developer. Follow him on GitHub.

The post CoreyLib: PHP Universal API Wrapper appeared first on The Changelog.

Given a User class that extends a Fiber Document:

$user = User::find('john');
$user->email = "john@example.com";
$user->city = "San Francisco";
$user->save();

Fiber also includes some nifty chaining:

$user->set( array( "email" => "peter@example.com", "city" => "Caracas" ) )->save();

Check out the examples in the source.

[Source on GitHub]

The post Fiber: A simple PHP interface to CouchDB appeared first on The Changelog.

Sometimes commercial apps just don’t survive, but let’s not confuse viable with valuable. Take the case of Storytlr, a hosted lifestreaming service which sought to let you remix your social networking interactions into your own “stories.” When the hard decision was made to pull the plug on the service at the end of last year, the founders did what many apps have done and handed the source code over to the community.

The official Storytlr open source project is on Google Code but John Hobbs has a fork on GitHub that adds:

• A tool to rename users (dangerous if not handled properly)
• Plugins built in for…
• Github
• goodreads
• Foursquare
• Stack Overflow
• Twitter favorites
• Google Buzz
• Ability to delete items that are from other sources (not just ones from Storytlr itself)
• tidy is replaced by htmLawed
• Misc fixes for issues reported on the Google group
• Misc fixes from other forks, esp. paths courtesy of Stuart Herbert

For a live demo, check out @abraham’s Storytlr at http://stream.abrah.am/.

Storytlr runs on PHP (which runs darn near everywhere) and installation instructions can be found in the README.

[Official Google Code Project] [Source on GitHub]

The post storytlr – lifestreaming for geeks appeared first on The Changelog.

Master-less replication

Riak is architected for master-less replication from the GET-go. All nodes participate equally in the replication so scaling horizontally means just adding new servers to join the party.

Links for powerful object graphs

Riak supports link-walking which is far more powerful than traditional relational DB joins. As Sean Cribbs explains:

Every datum stored in Riak can have one-way relationships to other data via the Link HTTP header. In the canonical example, you know the key of a band that you have stored in the “artists” bucket (Riak buckets are like database tables or S3 buckets). If that artist is linked to its albums, which are in turn linked to the tracks on the albums, you can find all of the tracks produced in a single request. As I’ll describe in the next section, this is much less painful than a JOIN in SQL because each item is operated on independently, rather than a table at a time. Here’s what that query would look like:

GET /raw/artists/TheBeatles/albums,_,_/tracks,_,1

More powerful Map/Reduce

Map/Reduce works a bit differently in Riak. Riak’s Map function expects a list of keys on which it should run. You can of course pass every key in your bucket, but doing Map in this way allows Map to be run on the node where the data is actually stored.

Riak ships with libraries for Python, Ruby, Java, Erlang, and even JavaScript. Want to know more? Stay tuned. Riak will be the focus of an upcoming episode of The Changelog.

[Source on BitBucket] [Homepage] [Brian Fink’s NYC-NoSQL talk]

The post riak – high performance document store built on JSON and REST appeared first on The Changelog.

There is an extensive list of [modules], even a MongoDB ORM, MangoDB.

[Source on GitHub] [Homepage] [Docs]

The post Kohana – The Swift PHP Framework appeared first on The Changelog.

Facebook however has decided to double down on PHP, releasing HipHop, a PHP source code transfomer:

HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP’s runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.

** Update **

We posted this blind yesterday when GitHub was unavailable. Looks like the repo isn’t public yet. Keep an eye out. GitHub explore shows five watchers…

[Source on GitHub] [Announcement]

The post Facebook’s HipHop leaves PHPers dancing appeared first on The Changelog.

Features include:

• Database
  • List
  • Create/drop
  • Repair
• Collection
  • Show collections
  • Create/drop collection
  • List indexes
  • Create/drop indexes
• Data objects
  • Show objects with 3-different viewing options (full, compact & uniform)
  • Create/delete objects
  • Edit object data
• Mongo GridFS
  • GridFS objects automatically link GridFS chunks to GridFS files

[Source on GitHub] [Homepage]

The post phpMoAdmin: MongoDB admin tool for PHP appeared first on The Changelog.

Capcake extends Capistrano, removing the rails-ism, replacing them by more cake-ish ones

[Source on GitHub]

The post Capcake: Deploy CakePHP apps using Capistrano appeared first on The Changelog.

After nearly two years of development, we are proud to announce the release of the first alpha version of the Drupal 7.x family. This alpha includes a tremendous number of new features and new under-the-hood improvements for both users and developers.

What’s new, what’s changed?

• Revamped User Interface
• Custom Fields
• Image Handling
• Update Manager
• Front-end “under-the-hood” improvements
• Back-end “under-the-hood” improvements

[Mirror on GitHub] [Official Release] [Homepage]

The post Drupal 7.0 Alpha 1 released appeared first on The Changelog.

1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.

2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.

3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.

4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

[Download] [Announcement]

The post WordPress 2.9 released appeared first on The Changelog.