Well, that’s what we’ve been doing and one of the reasons this sites been so quiet, well one of many

EpicAdvice.com, our new venture, aims to bring a site together with a strong community geared at answering the millions of questions that get asked about World of Warcraft everyday. All questions are tagged, organized and hopefully answered by other members of the community, building up a strong, question-based approach to a knowledge base.

We are using the StackExchange beta as our platform, which I might ad is pretty incredible right outta the box. There are still a few features missing from the system, and no way for us to add custom badges or reputation levels, but it serves the absolute needs of the site. I will probably write a little bit more about the engine as I get used to it.

Feel free to check us out at EpicAdvice.com, and let us know what you think!

The Active Record Pattern is a method developed to help access and store data in relational databases. This small post will cover some of the basic Active Record methods that you can use with the ADOdb Library in PHP. When used properly, the Active Record Pattern can help you develop and visualize your data faster than just throwing database queries into your applications.
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ADOdb is a powerful database abstraction library for PHP (as well as Python) designed to simplify some of the day to day database activities you may need in your PHP applications. I’ve used this library for about 3 years now, from site to site, just to simply the retrieval of data and cache the data locally for ease of use.

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Working with local development copies of websites can get to be a bit messy after a period of time, especially when you are developing work applications and personal applications on the same machine. So I figured I would share the method that I use to keep everything organized on my machine, and on my previous development machines. The focus of this article will be on Windows Machines running XAMPP or WAMP (or even straight apache).
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Using cURL is a simple and effective way to gather data from another website, run it through a script, parse the data and transform it into something useful that you can use on your website. Whether you are “scraping” data to build a summary of a link, pulling an XML file to parse into a database, or just simply wanting to get the contents of the file, cURL is a simple and effective way to pull the data from an outside source into your page.

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There is a lot of PHP specific syntax that every PHP programmer uses in their day to day work, that everyone has just learned that it is the way it is meant to be. But, to truly be able to go through, read someone’s code and truly understand it, you need to know exactly what the syntax means, and why it’s formatted that way. Throughout this small post, there are just some thoughts and practices for coding using the PHP syntax.

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In our first section, we talked about the multiple ways that you can use the equals sign to assign variables or compare them, based on value and type. In part 2 of this series, we are going to dive deeper into the comparison operators, and exactly how they function. There is a lot of basic programming concepts here, but where better to start than the basics.

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One of the fundamental variable types, yet one of the more complex when you are beginning, is the Array. The array just takes a little bit to wrap your mind around, or maybe a good analogy as to exactly what it is doing.

You can pretty much think of an array as a mini-storage unit for variables, someplace to order them, keep them in one space, and reference them by name dynamically. There are more advanced ways to do some of this as well but arrays are a good starting point.

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Coming into PHP fresh, you may notice a few things that don’t exactly line up with some of the other programming languages out there. In this initial “Operators” post, I am going to talk a little bit about the different operators that are available for people programming in PHP. There are different ways to compare and assign variables, as well as the reasons you might want to use each of these. It’s a good springboard or starting point for starting to understand PHP.

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I figured this would be a good time for a quick explanation of my goals and aspirations here.

The purpose of my writings within this blog are to sit and think about the web development in my everyday life, put into words the challenges and obstacles I encounter, in hopes to improve the quality of code I can produce. By making it a public format, a blog, I hope that some of the code snippets and ideas I post up will help you out as this personal project roles onwards.

From time to time, I also may review software or applications I use in my day to day life, or simply just come up with a few list posts of things that I find useful, and hopefully you will too.

Currently the direction I am heading is OO Programming with PHP and using the Zend Framework. The first post, hopefully within the next few days, will elaborate on how I got started with the ZF and how I am implementing it to develop applications for my job and life rapidly.