debuggable

Since a couple weeks I'm trying to pay a little closer attention to my coding habits to see if there still is some room for improvment (I'm sure there is). So one thing I noticed, was that I would always write 2 or 3 lines of code and then put in a debug() and directly check in the browser if it works. Sometimes I write more lines at once, but most of the time I work in very small steps. Now first I thought that it would certainly be faster to write whole blocks of code first, and then test them. But then I thought: "Faster? At what price?". Because if I would now start to quit my habit about short cycles, I might be done a little faster, but I would only have tested entire blocks of code, not most of the commands inside them one-by-one, which might leads to a decreased quality / stability of the source.

So I'm courious about what your programming habits are and what you think is a good style to adopt ; ).

Note: This is not directly CakePHP / PHP related, but I'd appreciate your comments anyway ; ).

Well, you probably all know a couple of reasons why layouts shouldn't be done with tables, why websites should pass the validator, and why html should be semantic in general.

But be honest to yourself, which one of them would impress a potential client? Very few of them. Most clients won't care how your HTML (CSS, JS, PHP, MYSQL, ...) looks like, as long as the website does what he or she wants.

So my question is: what would you tell a client (i.e. a non web-technology-savy person) to make him pay you additional money to pay attention to web standards?

One thing up front, I saw people / companies advertise web standards work with the argument that it's cheaper, but my personal experience has been, that making a difficult layout work in IE 5.5+, Firefox 1.x+, Opera, Safari (and maybe more) can be really time consuming compared to an table version of it. But now, I have to agree, that once it's done, working with it is easier and faster. But would you really use it as a reason?

Yesterday on 5th of June, CakePHP has reached revision 3000! I kind of missed this inoffical birthday because I was on the road, but anyway, I think it's a good time to congratulate the developers, contributers and the entire community for making CakePHP into what it is now - the best PHP framework around ; ).

If you want to stay up to date about everything concerning CakePHP, it is always a good idea to have a look at the CakePHP timeline.

Update: I just found a little issue with this technique inside CakePHP. Read more about this here: Issues with output buffering in CakePHP

Well, beeing on a 64 kbit connection (that's a long story ...) I've beeing bothered more then once by how long this blog took to load. So having played with gzip compression on other websites of mine like fg-webdesign.de in recent times, today I thought, why not do it with thinkingphp.org?

The results are quite astounding. The html of the initial start site was 125 kbyte before. Now putting in gzip compression it's just tiny 14 kbyte, 11,2% of the initial size! I think this is one of these 5 minute fixes that are worth more then hours of coding in certain projects ... ; ). Btw. the reason for the initial Html code to be that big is Geshi which outputs a lot of Html and CSS for syntax highlighting my PHP code I publish here.

Here is the code I just put on top of my header.php for my wordpress theme: (Nothing exiting, so)

The page should now load around 9-10x as fast as it has before ; ).

Today is a great day for the CakePHP community. Not only that CakePHP has released it's first officially stable Release, 1.0, no there is also a great looking new design at cakephp.org. The Design was done by Armando Sosa of nolimit sutdio. Congratulations to him, but also to the hard working CakePHP developers who made all of this possible!