LornaJane

A couple of weeks ago I gave a lightning talk at the PHPNW user group entitled "Geeks Can Write" or "Can Geeks Write?" - basically shooting down the worst of the excuses for not writing that I've heard and asking everyone to give it a shot! If you are interested, then the slides are on slideshare. Happy writing :)

I'm happy to announce that my new post 9 Magic Methods for PHP is live on Think Vitamin this morning. I've written a series of posts about OOP for the site, with a few more to come, and these "underscore-underscore" methods make for some very neat tricks with PHP, which I've tried to show in the post. Hope you like it :)

I'm very pleased to say that today I have a a post about web services for PHP developers published on techPortal! OK so I edit techPortal so this is the written equivalent of introducing myself as a speaker but I enjoyed writing the post and I hope it'll be a useful overview for PHP developers looking at web services and working with them.

I've been working on a series of articles for Think Vitamin, the Carsonified blog, about OOP in PHP5. In fact I'm wildly excited about this, partly because I love to write and partly because its such a cool site to write for! The first two installments are now live:

• Getting Started with OOP PHP5 - which is a very gentle overview of why OOP is such a buzz word, and shows off some very simple examples on how to begin and what the terms mean


• Getting Started with OOP PHP5: Part 2 - a follow on post showing constructors, static properties and methods, and also looks at how PHP handles objects.

None of it is rocket science but these are important topics often skated over by writers wanting to get to the complicated bits! Hopefully these posts bridge the gap between the very dated introductory PHP content that is still lying around on the web and the tutorials about shiny new stuff that are more typically found elsewhere. The community over on Think Vitamin is great, the comments and retweets have been very constructive and I'm very excited to be involved.

Publications

I find I'm writing for a few outlets other than just my blog these days and often want to refer people to that content as well, so I've added a "Publications" page, linked from the left hand sidebar. This will keep up with the articles I'm posting elsewhere, interviews, and anything else along those lines, all in one place.

I'm very proud to be able to say "I'm a PHP Advent author" - I've been invited to take part in this year's event and my article One Step at a Time is now live!

My post this year is aimed as a reminder to us all that we can all aspire to better things, and lots of "better" eventually adds up to "pretty damn good"! If you read the post and have comments, add them here - and if you've chosen what one thing you'd like to change next, I'd be delighted to hear it. Whatever your next step, good luck :)

Recently I've been spending a lot of time away from home, and busy with clients within office hours, which means I'm not available via my usual real-time communication mechanisms. This has given me the opportunity to enjoy email as a means of staying in touch with people that I would more usually chat with on IRC or some form of instant messaging.

When I write an email, I'm usually (mostly) doing that one thing, and the result is quite joined-up. Anyone who has had the experience of trying to carry on a conversation with me over messaging when I'm doing multiple things knows that I can easily lose the thread of an explanation and I often find I have to read back the logs of a conversation to be able to keep up.

When someone takes the time to write an email, the reader can't interrupt or divert the writer and so the writer is able to express their points at their own pace. Email is also easier to re-read and reformat, if you are the kind of writer that doesn't necessarily think of everything that needs to be said in quite the order it ought to be said.

When someone is emailing asking me to do something, I won't lose an email (you'd be surprised how often I lose things people ask me to do on IRC, its on a par with asking me in the pub). Admittedly, my inbox can be several months deep but when I have time to attend to your query, I will - and that goes for social correspondence as well.

Finally, and most importantly, it enables me to stay in touch with people whose committments don't fit around mine in terms of online availability due to work, life, or timezones.

I'm quite enjoying a slightly more formal exchange of the written word with those friends who are emailing me while I'm on these little jaunts - you know who you are and I don't enjoy being away from home so those little messages are welcome, thanks :) And for everyone else - next time you are lurking online looking out for someone, take the time to write an email instead - and let me know how it works for you.