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This train of thought started as an email response to a post by Nat Torkington last month, in which he lamented the shortage of experienced and capable business staff in New Zealand - the “deal-making CEOs and well-networked bizdev gurus.”

I’d been thinking and talking with others along the same lines over the past six months, most recently a couple of weeks ago with Chip Dawson at the PHP meetup. There are numerous technically innovative web startups in New Zealand, but very few that manage to bridge the gap from technical solution to viable business, and far less that bridge the next gap to explosive growth.

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Like Marc Gear, I also got the email from Zend this morning announcing the new Zend Studio beta, codenamed Neon and based on Eclipse (the open-source Java IDE originally created by IBM). I’ve been a Zend Studio Professional user for a couple of years and spend probably three-quarters of my computer time using the IDE so I’m very interested in the direction Zend are taking with the product.

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The preview of the new version of hugely popular web 2.0 social bookmarking site del.icio.us has been available (to invited users) for a few weeks now. In the news this morning Yahoo! have confirmed that del.icio.us was rebuilt using the Symfony framework. From the announcement on the Symfony website:

Of course, Yahoo! extended and modified Symfony to fit their needs, but what’s great is that they could actually do it, and that they will contribute their modifications back to the community in the form of plugins and bug fixes.

This is another major success for the framework following on from the earlier announcement that Yahoo! Bookmarks had been redeveloped with Symfony. Congratulations are due to Fabien, the team at Sensio and the Symfony community who have worked tirelessly to produce one of the highest quality enterprise PHP frameworks available.

We’ve added RSS feeds for your favourites on Eventfinder, which makes it easy to add a list of events you’re going to be attending to your website or blog. Kudos to Stuart Maxwell for suggesting this one, it’s brilliant.

For those with a recent version of WordPress and a widget-capable theme, it’s even simpler. Follow the steps below to get a sidebar like the one on the right so your visitors can see what you’re going to be up to!

1. Log in to WordPress and go to Presentation > Widgets
2. Drag the RSS 1 widget into your sidebar, and click the configure link (to the right of the RSS widget box)
3. Enter your RSS feed address:

   http://www.eventfinder.co.nz/username.rss (all your favourites) or
   http://www.eventfinder.co.nz/username/going.rss (just attending)

   

ZT software tool: http://ipv6.ztsoftware.net/ipv4-to-ipv6/
4. Enter a title (e.g. Events I’m Attending) and how many events you want shown (I chose five)
5. Close the configure window by clicking the X in the top right corner, then Save Changes

That’s it - now go back and check your blog to see the automatically updated list of your favourites in your sidebar.

As Sid points out, I’ve been away from here far too long. Hopefully this marks a (semi-permanent) return to blogging! First up we launched social networking on Eventfinder (the Symfony site I’ve been working on full time since Nerds Inc) last week and it’s really taken off - traffic stats are up 20% and still growing. That was definitely the right feature to work on

The New Zealand PHP Users Group has also been growing rapidly, we’ve now got over 400 members! I moved the mailing list to Google Groups 9 months ago and I’m sure that’s helped with growth and making the list (and archives) more visible on the web. Prior to moving it had taken over 3 years to reach 238 members - I’m sure the acceleration in numbers can be attributed at least partly to growth in PHP usage too, but it’s certainly more accessible now on Google Groups.

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