In this article I'll give a few examples of powerful ways to program PHP that aren't obvious to many. The tricks I mention here are in themselves nothing new and experienced programmers probably know about them all but budding and intermediate PHP programmers can probably pick up a thing or two.

Eclipse has been my primary web development environment for over a year now. With plugins for version control, JavaScript/AJAX and PHP development, it's a perfect integrated environment for building Drupal websites and writing modules and themes. Eclipse has worked mostly fine apart from recently when I've been having some problems with system crashes (virtually unheard of on a Mac) seeming related to Eclipse or Apache. In an attempt to fix that problem I reinstalled Apache, MySQL and PHP as well as Eclipse and also took the opportunity to try the PHP Development Tools from Zend.

I was glad to stumble over Kilowatts (aka James Watts) and Vanek's (aka Peter van Ewijk) new album today when for some impulsive reason googling for "Kilowatts & Vanek". K&V's first album, titled Rawq, was an innovative result an online collaboration between the two musicians through the Internet. They didn't meet in person until they first performed the songs live.

Many of you have asked me about the future of my templates for phpBB and when they will be ported to phpBB 3, the next version of the popular forum system. After much thinking and considering of my own priorities, I have found two ways to go ahead but I need your feedback. Please read this post and post your own thoughts as comments.

So I've been very busy the past few months. Barely time to do anything but seeing clients, working and lapping a little sunshine now and then. The farthest from Sweden I got was to Oslo (Norway) to spend a week there hanging out with friends and trying not to think about how expensive it was.

I sometimes refer to myself as a web designer, a term that to many people I meet means "someone who makes websites pretty". This is a rather narrow definition and one I'd like to extend and widen and put in context with what us web professionals actually do. This blog post, the first in a series about building websites (or solving problems the way I look at it), covers some of my own thoughts regarding the trade of building websites and how a web professional or web designer thinks compared to print designers.

I watched Lost in Translation tonight with my younger brother. It wasn't the first time. It was more like the third, and well, just like millions of people I still like it as much as I did the first time I saw it.