Gratuitous and unnecessary dog picture (Pic: Steven Jack)

To be honest, I’m a bit ashamed.

I’ve been working with web development and internet marketing for almost half a decade and only now, in 2010 for Christ’s sake, have I got round to starting a blog.

There are plenty of excuses: haven’t had the time, I thought it might be tricky to set up, didn’t need another codebase to get to grips with. But frankly, they’re all pretty pathetic.

As it happens, I’ve been amazed by just how easy it’s been to set up a WordPress blog. I bought this snazzy, clean theme and had it all up and running on my Windows dev server in about 5 mins. Transferring it to my cluster took a little more effort, but the whole thing has only taken a few hours, and most of that was browsing through different themes.

Anyway, I’m here now, so let’s look to the future.

The plan is to blog about the trickier issues that I come across working as a web developer. So you can mainly expect stuff relating to PHP, MySQL and Zend Framework. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there ends up being a smattering of Apache, jQuery and server admin posts too.

The inspiration, if you can call it that, is a pretty selfish one. I’ve recently been working on Entertainment Manager, an “enterprise-level” business management tool for Entertainment Agencies (which I’ll blog about at a later date). Inevitably, I’ve stumbled into a few issues where it’s been tough to find any real solutions online.  It may be because PHP is a relative new comer as an ”enterprise” (I hate that term) language, or just because some of the terminology gets a bit vague when dealing with more complex problems.

In any case, the aim of this blog is to document these thorny problems and their solutions so that I have something to refer to in the future when I’ve forgotten all the details (like next week… OK, tomorrow). It’d be a massive bonus if other people could benefit from my experience and save themselves a few hours of head scratching in the process.

There’s a real danger that I won’t post often enough and that the quality of the content may be, um, variable. But, hey, it’s taken me five years to get to this point, so give me a break, eh?

There are a handful of issues on the to-blog list at the moment:

• Nested transactions using Zend_Db (done)
• Plugin functionality for models
• Practical Model/Resource (i.e. DB) separation
• “Real” modular bootstrapping with Zend_Application
• How to make your models fatter and your controllers thinner (Part One)

Hopefully I’ll come up with something of interest so you’ll be back soon.

Steve