Writing

Jade is a templating language often found in the JavaScript world. Heavily influenced by Haml, it provides an extremely concise way of defining your XML-based markup. JadePHP brings it to PHP, and in this article I take it for a test-drive.

An introduction to Flysystem, a PHP library which provides developers with a layer of abstraction over file storage systems including standard local files, online services such as Dropbox and Cloud Files and remote storage mechanisms such as FTP.

A tutorial on building a live score widget for football matches, using web sockets and PHP's Ratchet library.

Building a subscription-based website or application with Laravel, using Recurly to process recurring payments. In this first part I look at setting up the application, configuring users and roles, and building an authentication system.

Using Iron Worker to process long-running or processor-intensive tasks in the cloud using the Iron Worker service.

A tutorial on using Prowl to send ad-hoc push notifications. I include a practical example; extending Zend Framework's logging class to send critical errors direct to authorised mobile phones.

An introduction to using Facebook's Subscription API and real-time updates to subscribe to changes in user data, with a practical example which emails someone when they've been un-friended"."

Using PHP (Slim framework) to manage and upload episodes, maintain metadata and construct a podcast feed suitable for submission to iTunes.

Creating a stock quote service which operates using SMS, using online telephony service Twilio.

An introduction to the Browser Capabilities Project (Browscap), and how to use it to do server-side device detection for mobile theme switching, guessing" the user's operating system, and more