Just about every day, I have an idea for a blog post, and most days, by the end of the day, I just don't have the time or energy to actually write anything up. The inner writer in me screams, "no excuses!" while the aging adult in me whispers, "time for bed, dear."

So, to keep my hand in the game, here are a few things running through my head, or that I'm working on, or that I'll be doing soon.

Speaking at PHP Quebec

I'm speaking at PHP Quebec this coming spring, and presenting "Practical Zend Framework Jutsu with Dojo". I will be reworking the talk I did at php|works to present new features and new techniques I've been working on for effectively using Dojo and Zend Framework together. Hopefully my laptop and the projector will play nice together this time!

PHP Advent Calendar

Chris Shiflett and Sean Coates have generously donated some time and a domain to this year's PHP Advent Calendar. I was invited to submit an entry, and wrote up a piece I titled "Use Responsibly", where I discuss good development habits when consuming open source projects.

Burlington, VT PHP User's Group

This week marks the one year anniversary of regular meetings of the Burlington, VT PHP User's Group. We meet this week for a special presentation from Josh Sled of Sun Microsystems, on database indexing, joins and subqueries, database optimization, and more. If you're in the area Thursday evening, come join us!

Zend Framework 1.7.1

Yesterday, we released Zend Framework 1.7.1, the first bugfix release in the 1.7 series. Not much more to say about it, other than start downloading!

Pastebin updates

I've been continuing development on the pastebin application I developed for demonstrating Zend Framework and Dojo integration. In the past couple weeks, I've reworked it substantially, adding support for dojo.back so as to stay in the same page while utilizing the application; the results are quite good. One side effect of this is that I've reworked and simplified the view scripts, and added REST, JSON-RPC, and XML-RPC endpoints to simplify the XHR infrastructure. I'm getting pretty happy with the results…

…which has led me to jump to the next milestone, which is to integrate the bug application I worked up for the Dutch PHP Conference last summer and start creating a suite of collaborative developer tools. These are intended to do three things: (1) demonstrate best practices and good architecture when using Zend Framework, (2) demonstrate appropriate techniques when using Dojo with Zend Framework, and (3) to scratch an itch (I'd like to use these tools for my personal projects). I've code named the project "Spindle", a name I like for its rich connotations. If you're interested in contributing, drop me a line, and I'll set you up with commit access. Or fork it, and send me patches. Whatever.

Oh, and one more thing…

Ha! fooled you!

Seriously, though, there are, to quote something I saw on twitter today, a "metric shit-ton" of holidays and observances of just about every faith and geographic origin in the coming month. Enjoy, and best tidings of the season to you!