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New host - Jul 22, 2001
Yea! Finally moved the site to it's new host. I get to play with all the new PHP toys, like
Zend Encoder, without having to spend a couple grand for the pleasure. I do
a ton of homework before picking a web host, so if you're looking for a good
virtual host for your site you can't do much better than CQHost. If anything's broken after the move here, let me know.
New toy, PHP-RSS - Jun 11, 2001
Wheee. New class for you to play with. A quick-n-dirty RSS
parser that does not require that XML support be compiled into PHP. It does
require PHP v4 with PCRE support. No documentation, some demo files are
included in the tarball showing usage. It's fairly simple, took all of two
hours to write and works extremely well.
PHP-RSS-0.91.tar.gz
View Source pretty or plain
Long time, no update - May 15, 2001
Well with the PHP4 codebase more than stable I suppose it's
time I released some updated packages. FT 1.2 is in the works, including
MySQL and Cached template support. This is a major re-write of the entire FT
structure. I started with a new base class - FastTemplate Light,
which just does simple variable interpolation in your templates with no
logic at all. All the new classes (and the previous incarnation of FT) will
extend from this ultra-simplistic object. This is the way OOP is supposed to
work. It'll also give developers a wide range of template options from the
generic to the mind bogglingly complex. Oh, and did I mention that FT is now
about twice as fast as 1.1? Hey there - stop drooling on your
keyboard.
FastTemplates HOWTO
Joshua Curtis has written up a nice HOWTO on FastTemplates. The
HOWTO uses the creation of a "themeable" web site that allows visitors to
change the "look-n-feel" of the entire web site with a single
click-a-da-mouse. A perfect example of when and how to use FastTemplates to
just kick butt when designing major web sites.
CachedFastTemplate
Jesus Castagnetto, (co-author of "Professional PHP
Programming") has created a derived class called CachedFastTemplate. As the
name implies, it's used to cache dynamic pages that don't change all that
often. This speeds up performance tremendously, as no dynamic solution will
ever rival the sheer speed of a static page. I haven't had much of a chance
to play with it yet, but it looks like fun.
CachedFastTemplate
In case you're wondering, the banners and ads on the site are primarily placeholders and ad tests.I'm using this site to develop templates for a commercial site I'm working on.