Dark Side of the Carton

I’m a full time PHP developer, so after spending the first few years coding in some free text editor, Crimson Editor and then later PSPad, I moved to a full blown PHP IDE. Naturally the 2 choices for a PHP IDE are the Zend Studio and PhpED. There are other products, but none of them are up to the same level of quality as these applications. Zend Studio is written in Java and put out by the Zend Company which you would assume meant it was the superior product. I mean, Zend is basically the company behind PHP at this point. I installed both apps and after quite a bit of testing decided I would go with the faster application, PhpED. My initial testing was done with PhpED 4.6.2 under Windows Vista Business.

PhpED is a native Windows application that had most of the features of Zend Studio at the time and some that ZS lacked, like built in Terminal access. At the time, ZS had a few features that PhpED did not, like code folding. With the 5.0 release of PhpED, it now blows Zend Studio out of the water. The main new feature in this release is the addition of code folding. For those of you not in the know, code folding is exactly what it sounds like. It allows you to select blocks of code and literally fold them or hide them from view. When working in OOP environments this is a huge help. It lets you hide class methods and view a quick summary of what the class is made up of. You can even select portions of code inline and collapse them.

I installed PhpED 5.0 last week and its as fast as ever. I highly suggest anyone on the fence about which IDE to jump on seriously give PhpED a chance. I would also suggest paying the extra cost for the 3yr maintenance as it comes with free upgrades.

For more on PhpED, visit NuShpere’s website at http://www.nusphere.com

Nothing to see here. This is my fake story about Shiggy’s bronzed boogers from Digg.

In one of the many Digg submissions about this week’s Virtual Console releases for the Wii it was mentioned that any story with the word “Wii” in it would hit the front page and mykos said: “If a Wii fan found a discarded booger from Shigeru Miyamoto, they’d have it bronzed.”

I decided to test that theory with this post. So far it’s gotten far more Diggs than most of my submissions, which is downright sad. So there you have it, no boogers and certainly no bronzed ones belonging to the man they call Shiggy.

I’ve been a member on Digg long enough to know how things work. You submit a story and if it’s cool, it gets dugg up. I run a video game site part time and one of the big challenges is the “rat race” of posting hot new gaming news. Being the first one to post a hot new story is damn near impossible, but we all scamper around as if we have a shot. Then, when we aren’t the first ones to post something, we pretend like we were. It’s a silly little game in reality. With the massive number of new gaming sites starting to pop up and people realizing that Digg is a perfect tool to launch there site into the mainstream, think ActionButton here, the increasing number of intentional story dupes is getting out of hand.

Take for example the story I posted this morning about Nintendo donating 100 Wii systems to the YMCA to promote healthy living. I posted the story first thing this morning, a full hour or more than the next occurence of the story. Since then, the exact story has been submitted to Digg 4 additional times. The trick to getting a story Dugg now has less to do with getting your story submitted first and more to do with when you submit it. Since nobody cares if there are dupes, the story submitted at the highest peak time is most likely to have the highest number of Diggs.

I guess you could say this is another way that people are gaming Digg to promote their site above spreading news. I’ll admit that I’ve intentionally duped stories to try and see when the best time to submit stories to Digg is. In the end, I think having a large group of friends that digg your stories still results in a much better chance of hitting the topic front page or even the main page of Digg. Here is a screenshot of my story on Digg with the subsequent Diggs:

You will notice that my story previously had the most Diggs until a story posted much later has started to pick up steam. I love Digg and I do think it’s a great way to build awareness of your site, but at this rate I think the ratio of site admins and seos to regular readers on digg will increase and you will see the effectiveness of a site like Digg go down the tubes.