PBwiki is really great. Everyone I work with has been super good about making me feel at home. I’m starting to get into some more complex projects. I’ve been meaning to get some photos posted but haven’t gotten around to taking any. Hopefully in the next couple days I’ll post some pics of my apartment and neighborhood.

Last week I attended the San Francisco PHP Meetup where Terry Chay talked about frameworks. In particular he discussed how off the shelf frameworks suck because of the consequences. He definitely was coming from the point of view of someone who writes very large highly scalable websites and in that context I very much agree with him. He did say that these frameworks are good for toy projects and enterprise software which I’d agree with.

I’ve really wanted to find a good framework to use and I’ve come pretty close with Solar and Kohana but I’m never satisfied with the trade-offs. I feel like I can use libraries from Solar or Zend if I need to as long as I code things properly on my end. I follow the same naming structure as Solar and Zend where my file names and classes match up and I use a parent “namespace” to keep my code from polluting the global namespace.

Hopefully I’ll be able to stay in contact with folks because they have been a great team to work with. Many people are already talking about flying out to visit me in CA.

I’m not even leaving Netconcepts 100% as I’m going to continue working on the SEO Title Tag plugin and the WordPress Quiz plugin. I’ve told them that they need to transition them to a Netconcepts developer but since my departure leaves them somewhat short handed I can pick up the slack for now.

This week is all about packing. I still have a lot to pack and the moving company comes on Friday. I fly out to San Mateo on Saturday and I start my first day at PBwiki on Monday, October 20th.

I’m very excited about this move, I think this is going to be a great opportunity.

I’ve just accepted a position with http://www.pbwiki.com as a junior developer. I start there on October 20th, so it will be a crazy couple of weeks preparing to move.

I’ve wanted to move to the bay area for quite some time, and this was finally the opportunity to do it. I’m sad to leave Netconcepts, they have been a great group of folks to work with and I’ve learned a lot. Pbwiki seems like it will be an awesome place to work, lots of cool smart people and a really sweet product to work on.

I’ll try to post more as it happens, how I’m adjusting to San Mateo and the bay area in general. I’m sure it will be an adventure.

Today I was reading a post about a talk Rasmus Lerdorf (the creator of PHP who currently works at Yahoo) gave yesterday at DrupalCon where he mostly was talking about the performance of PHP frameworks. In the midst of this post I read something interesting.

Rasmus made a special point of highlighting the importance of embedding structured metadata into the page. RDFa allows you to embed data into your web pages and also lets you create custom vocabularies, or even better, reuse existing vocabularies. Why would you want to do this? SearchMonkey will go out and index this content and open up a rich search API to allow you to do intelligent queries. Well beyond what is possible with traditional search.

I know Netconcepts has started to experiment with SearchMonkey (I spoke on this topic at Web608) but this is the first I’ve really heard of RDFa. I’ve heard of RDF before (Resource Description Framework) but only in terms of XML documents (commonly used with RSS feeds). But what is RDFa? A quick look to Wikipedia says:

RDFa (or Resource Description Framework attributes) is a set of extensions to XHTML being proposed by W3C. RDFa uses attributes from XHTML’s meta and link elements, and generalises them so that they are usable on all elements. This allows you to annotate XHTML markup with semantics.

Has anyone been paying attention to this? I wonder how useful this could be in GravitySream. Since it’s an extension to XHTML I wonder if the site has to be valid XHTML in order to take full advantage of RDFa.

For more information on RDFa you can check out the RDFa Primer from the W3C and the original article I read Rasmus Lerdorf - PHP frameworks? Think again.

Today I got out to San Francisco without any issues. Had to get up at 3am though. Once I got checked into my hotel I figured I should hunt down a rental car facility so I could reserve a car for Saturday. Turns out, I’ll need to pick it up Friday and drop it off on Sunday because of their hours of operation.

Then I took a ride on the cable car to fisherman’s whorf where I visited the Musée Mécanique at Pier 45. It was pretty great. It was filled with all sorts of coin op fun. I played several pinball machines, some skeeball as well as looking at some of the entertaining machines.

Then I had some calamari and snapple and walked back to my hotel. Not too bad, only took about a half hour. Needless I was pretty pooped when I got back.

One idea I’ve had recently would be to have a Bigfoot party. The idea being that my parents live out in the country and their house is surrounded by forest. I’d have a bunch of people get dressed up as Bigfoot and we would all go out into the forest and have a party. I don’t think this would work because one of the reasons Schwaklakk is successful is that it requires very little from the participants. I supply the soap and they just show up at my apartment and there is free food, booze and soap carving. To go all the way out to Edgerton and to have to have a costume I feel would raise the participation bar to the level where I’d probably have very few people showing up.

However, if I could pull it off… how cool would that be? Especially if we got a disco ball and a DJ.