Study Update: MST121, MS221 and M255 End, M263 Begins

It's now a year since I started studying again, part-time, towards a BSc. I last updated the public about six months ago, so here's the latest for those very few readers that may be interested!

How Do You Zend_View? I'll Show You Mine...

An interesting design decision made by the Zend Framework team was, well, not to make too many decisions about how the View portion of a Zend Framework MVC application should be implemented. You can use plain PHP to generate markup, use a templating library such as Smarty or Savant, or go your own way entirely. At work we've used both Wall4PHP, and subsequently a custom component-based solution, for example.

The flexibility is great then, but with freedom comes responsibility. Perhaps coincidentally, view scripts tend to be the part of a ZF app that attract the most cruft, the most untestable code, and the most mingling of concerns (though controllers certainly give them a run for their money).

Since someone recently asked, I'll show how I've implemented views on pointbeing.net. I don't claim that the approach is awesome, or even suitable for every case, but it seems to work for me. In return I'd very much like to hear or see how others implement their Zend_Views.

Manual Comment Spam

Some time last year I installed a CAPTCHA tool on this site, in an attempt to mitigate the deluge of spam comments that I was receiving.

It has actually been very successful: despite some fairly concerted attempts, since that date, I don't think any automated spam has got through.

What I am seeing, however, is a steady increase in the amount of manual spam. By this I mean actual human people coming to the site and entering inane comments promoting various seedy businesses. I guess hiring kids or the unemployed to do this is no more expensive than hiring people to hand out flyers in the street - and you see plenty of that.

So I'd be interested to hear if other bloggers are seeing this, and how they tend to deal with it.

In the meantime, if you are among this type of spammer, I'll politely ask you to move along elsewhere: I'll only delete your comment and block your IP, and it'll become quite tiresome for all of us. william@geeksltd.co.uk, that includes you, though I suspect that's a made up address.

Normal service will now be resumed, and I promise that my next post will contain some real content!