by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I never know what other people don’t see. Cathleen didn’t know that BloodhoundBlog and DistinctivePhoenix.com are based on the same WordPress template. Likewise for Real Estate Weblogging 101 and The Phoenix Real Estate Technology Exchange. She could see the differences, but not the similarities, not until I noodged her to look for them. Yesterday, I posted on a program that works out of an array, and it was only after I had hit publish that it occurred to me that I hadn’t defined what an array is. My expectation is that these posts, professions of enthusiasm notwithstanding, are progenitors of a profound megoism, but, if anyone craves a deeper understanding of arrays, email me.

Meanwhile, take a look at this image:

This is a highly-stylized rendition of what Easter will look like in a world where pi equals four. No, that’s not right. It’s a map to very common sort of web page layout in the world of Cascading Style Sheets. If we ignore the differences and focus only on the similarities, that stylized page looks like… this page. And your own web pages, very probably, and dozens or hundreds of other pages that you’ve seen. There can be superficial differences — the sidebar can be on the left, or there can be two sidebars, or the two sidebars can straddle the main content area — but what we’re looking at, at bottom, is the essence of a text-oriented web page in the CSS world.

Why think about this?

(Oh, man! Don’t get me started! I’m going to think about it, with you or without you, because I want for there to be at least one space in the void where it’s permissible to have a brain…)

Wait, that’s not why. Here’s why: Because if we think about how pages are engineered, we can engineer them.

Like this: If we see a page like that on a web site — a page like this one — we know that it’s just one of tens or hundreds or thousands of pages, all of which will look pretty much the same.

Here’s an important question: When one of those pages Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I know I promised to do nothing but “includes,” and we’ll come back to those soon, but here is a real PHP routine, doing an actual real world job. What does it do? For a multi-author weblog like BloodhoundBlog, it produces a blogroll of the contributors’ weblogs or web sites. I’m sending this out to Morgan Brown, because Blown Mortgage is a multi-author blog — and because Morgan has joined ranks with Cheryl Johnson as a geek-blogger.

Why do this with software when it can be done with the “Links” feature within WordPress? Because a list done this way is self-maintaining. This code is based on the “Frequent Contributors” code on BloodhoundBlog — which would be a lot harder to explain. I added this last week when I upgraded to WordPress 2.3.2.

Here’s the code. I’ll go back through it and comment line-by-line:

<h2>Our Contributors' Web Sites</h2><UL>

<?PHP
$contribs = array(1,3,6,8,9);
$count = sizeof($contribs);
shuffle($contribs);
for($i=0;$i<$count;$i++)
	{
	$thisUser = $contribs[$i];
	$curauth = get_userdata($thisUser);
	?>
	<li><a href="<?PHP echo $curauth->user_url; ?>" 
	target="_blank">
	<?php echo $curauth->yim; ?></a></li>
	<?PHP
	}
?></UL>

Here’s the thing: PHP is a very sloppy language.

From Ada Lovelace to Kernighan and Richie, programming was always done with very tight, very clean code. Hardware was slow and expensive, so programmers were, relatively speaking, plentiful and cheap. Moore’s Law inverts that paradigm, with the result that any cost in hardware is worth bearing to maximize programmer time. This is why you’re always buying bigger, faster hardware, because programmers are sucking up every bit of it and then some. ANSI C was perhaps the apogee of the orbit for clean code: Strongly typed, strict syntax, unforgiving compilers. But, written right, C could get right down to the bone, running as fast, or almost as fast, as functionally-equivalent machine code.

PHP is like C in many, many respects — except that, like Javascript before it, it dispenses with type-checking, function prototyping, most syntax-checking, etc. It’s interpreted at run-time, not compiled, so there’s no compiler to catch errors. Instead of maximizing machine resources, PHP maximizes programmer time. It exists to let a skilled programmer bang out tons of original code in no time flat. Many other web programming environments are similarly loose, and, while this grates Read more