What better day to resurrect the blog than Halloween?

Even though I must admit to have enjoyed the time off it pained me to know test.ical.ly dead for about two weeks. Not even a stub website or placeholder was accessible. Google rankings are probably lost.

The story behind this teaches a lesson or two.

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test.ical.ly

Recently I started yet another pet project of mine that aims at easing the process of blog post promotion for test.ical.ly. As this blog is run on WordPress it made sense to implement the required features as a WordPress plugin.

Argh, nooooo not WordPress it’s code is soooo ugly. Or so I heard..

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PHP · Wordpress

Last Tuesday I stumbled upon a interesting post by Paolo “Nusco” Perrotta from Italy entitled Is Windows 8 solving the wrong problem? He’s got some points there and his post really got me thinking if the same logic can be applied to other developments as well.

For instance to HTML5 as a cross device strategy?

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Android · architecture · cross-device · html5 · iOS · web apps

About a month ago I asked you what do you think about advertising on test.ical.ly for Open Source sponsoring. In the last few weeks more thank 50 people participated in the poll.

Here are the results.

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advertising · Online Marketing · Open Source · test.ical.ly

Lately I have been using Silex a lot for developing Facebook applications. Currently I’m working on one that could become a little bigger though and I am seriously uncertain whether to stay with the micro-framework Silex or moving to a full blown Framework like Symfony2.

I just don’t know when Silex will become too limited or if at all.

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micro-frameworks · PHP · Silex · Symfony2

Moving hosters is always a step to be careful about. Because it depends on how fast the old host reacts and how quick the DNS changes are through. In the meantime you might end up with two identical systems. You may not be able to maintain them both so the switch might force you to migrate again.

How to void the gap?

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Apache · mod_proxy

Not long ago I thought Adobes Flash would probably die. Microsoft took a small piece of the cake with Silverlight while Apple banned Flash from the iPad altogether. Even Adobe themselves jumped the HTML5 train with Adobe Edge. Flash became uncool and nothing it seemed could be done with it that couldn’t be done with HTML5.

Now I guess I have to change my mind.

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Flash · Games · html5 · iPad · Social Gaming

Last week I received a comment on my post about writing on a Facebook Page wall with no logged-in user asking if I could write an example how to post a note. Usually I don’t blog on request but I’ve never noticed this Facebook Notes feature before and found it to be quite a nice way to publish custom HTML on Facebook.

So I show you how and why.

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Facebook · PHP · social media

A few months ago we launched this app already but it got wiped again. Now after some refactoring and redesigning on our side and after some changes on the Facebook side (event creation no longer spawns a status update!) the app is live again still powered by Symfony2.

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Assetic · CoffeeScript · compass · Dropbox · Facebook · html5 · html5boilerplate · JQuery · SASS · Symfony2 · Tv-Programm · Twig