MongoDB is a full-featured object database. Since it is fast, versatile, and schema-less, you can develop a very complex data storage layer without an ORM, and without any tedious coding. For this reason, I have been investigating MongoDB as a storage layer for PHP. Here's how to set up an environment...

The Second in my three-part series on Drupal an OpenAmplify has been published on their community site. If you missed the first part, you may want to start there. Part three, coming soon, will cover the API, and will focus on development instead of configuration.

In part two, I walk through the process...

It just came to my attention that a WebMonkey article (Parsing HTML? There's an App for That) from a few months ago suggested using QueryPath as an alternative to attempting to parse HTML by hand.

Appropriately, last week I wrote a QueryPath script to analyze a site and extract all links so that...

OS X does not come with wget, a command-line tool for retrieving websites. For a while, I grumbled about this. I knew that curl was installed, but I hadn't ever used curl from the command line. But once I tried it out, I realized that for my needs, curl is just as good as wget... and I don't have...

Over at OpenAmplify's Community site, they are running Part 1 of a three-part series I've written about using OpenAmplify with Drupal.

The first part covers the basics of using Acquia Drupal and the Amplify module to perform semantic analysis of your content. <!--break-->

Nagios is a network monitoring tool. I use it to track web servers, mail servers, and whatever else I have running on the LAN and on the Internet.

One common configuration issue is getting the Service Commands menu to work correctly. By default, it is visible in the UI, but disabled on the server...

In our webinar Playing Nicely With Others: Integrating Drupal with Third-Party Data, Ken, George, Larry, and I talk about integrating various web services with Drupal. We talk about SOAP, content importing, digital asset management systems, and QueryPath (surprisingly, I'm not the one plugging QueryPath...

I have released two projects today:

• Fortissimo: A PHP framework with a twist. It's scalable, it's not MVC, it's fast, and it's NSFW!
• Pilaster: A pure PHP document database that provides similar services to MongoDB or CouchDB -- only without the server.

Both are still under heavy development, but...

Like many people, I spent the last few days away from my computer, spending the holidays with family. Today, when I logged in to post a brief blog entry, I found hundreds upon hundreds of SPAM comments had gotten through the Mollom blocking software that supposedly protects my comments section. I...

Using Phing on a Mac OS X console sometimes has a strange result: While the Phing script runs correctly, the console displays nothing. The reason for this is that the ANSI color codes used by some versions of Phing are not supported by OS X.

The solution is simple. Change the output logger.

$ phing...