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In partnership with Microsoft Philippines, PHP User Group Philippines presents PHP Developers Summit 2010. We are inviting you to come and join us in this gathering of the country’s best tech-talents, professionals and web developers promoting the use of PHP and open source solutions in the enterprise and schools. Free flowing coffee with lots of freebies and raffle prizes!

So what are you waiting for? Registration starts at 8 AM. See you all there!

Date: January 30, 2010, Saturday
Time: 8.00 AM – 5.00 PM
Venue: Hotel Rembrandt
             26 Tomas Morato Extension Quezon City, Philippines
Location Map: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=13146968077348134590&q=hotel%2Brembrandt%2Bquezon%2Bcity%2Baddress

Speakers:
Dominick Nowell A. Danao (CEO of Happy Mobile Inc.)
- Former VASHead of Sun Cellular.  Founder of Pinoymail which he sold to Smart’s Orlando Vea for P100M back in the early 2000s.  He is also a Palanca
Awardee.  He will discuss PHP Development with Yahoo Developer’s Network.  He recently won in the Yahoo Open Hack’s Day in Indonesia.

Bing Bryan Tan (President and CEO of Brewed Concepts)
- Keynote Speaker

Paolo Alexis Falcone (Senior Developer, Friendster Inc.)
- Will discuss PHP Scaling

Alezandra Nicholas (Microsoft Developer Evangelist)
- Website spark and Bizspark

Rodney Jao (MCP)
- PHP in IIS7 (using Fast CGI) and about PHP and ASP.NET interop via SOAP

Rick Bahague, Jr. (Computer Professionals’ Union)
- Windows Cache Extension for PHP

Globe Labs
- Globe Labs API

Sponsors:
Microsoft Philippines
Zend
Globe Labs

Limited Special Offer
If you register early and pay within the year 2009, you’ll get a ticket for only Php 1,000.00 and we’ll give you One (1) FREE Microsoft limited edition thumb drive.

Registration and Ticket Payment Instructions
Online registration website is currently being tested right now. In the mean time, you could pre-register by sending your name, position, company and contact details to chean@phpugph.com and by settling your ticket payment through bank deposit:

Bank Name: Banco de Oro (BDO)
Account Name: PHP User Group Philippines Inc.
Savings Account No. 290226988
Branch: San Juan Branch

To all who would pay for the event tickets, kindly send me a scanned copy of the deposit slip for payment confirmation.

Cherrie Ann B. Domingo
President
PHP User Group Philippines Inc.
Web: http://www.phpugph.com

Graphic Designer vs client [90% profanity might not be safe for work]

Google Reader just released new features such as people you can now follow, liking a post, grouping of people you follow, finding publicly shared items. Features seems familiar? Yes, you got it right. They’ve been features of FriendFeed for quite some time now.

Your move FriendFeed.

Liked this post? Subscribe to the feed

Adobe BrowserLab is a new cool web service that helps you test your web pages across a different web browsers and operating systems.

Adobe BrowserLab currently supports Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on both Mac and Windows XP. Just enter the website’s URL and it will take screenshots of your web page on different browsers and platforms. It displays the result using 1-up (on its own screenshot), 2-up (side by side comparison) and my favorite Onion Skin View (as shown below) where you can quickly pinpoint differences.

One awesome feature of the Onion Skin View is you can use the a slider to fade in/out of each browser screenshot. Pretty cool!

Hopefully Adobe will support more browsers and operating systems in the future.

Google Wave Developer Preview presentation at the Day 2 Keynote of Google I/O. To learn more visit http://wave.google.com

I’m not sure how/why these activation URLs were crawled by Googlebot but yes, Google still publicly shows some WordPress.com usernames and the email addresses associated with the username.

Ha! Now all hackers need is the password (no pun intended). Clearly, this is not good. But who is to blame? Google? Wordpress? Or the end-user? Quite frankly, I am not sure. But I do know that it is time to change some of those information starting with the email address associated with that account.

Also, don’t forget making your password a bit stronger/longer using uppercases, numbers and character combinations.

So, how do you get this result? Simply enter “site:en.WordPress.com “your account is now active”” or click this link.

How do you find if your username was crawled? Add your username at the end like this:
“site:WordPress.com “your account is now active” johnsmith”

I suggest you change them now. It’s better safe than sorry.

I just logged in the new interface of Google Adwords. The look and feel of the new AdWords is now very much like Google Analytics.

First screenshots of the new Google AdWords interface.

Do you like how it looks like? To fuel the fire, I’m using Google AdWords everyday and I can definitely say that this is a huge improvement. The new ajaxy interface gives it a desktop-app-like feel. I’ve tried loading it in Google Chrome and was blazing fast. The old interface for me was very clunky and slow. So any improvement from that is a jump ahead.

Kudos to the Google AdWords team for making this improvement. It’s really cool!

I’m an avid subscriber of NETTUTS. A popular tech blog that covers a wide range of topics about web development such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, CMS’s, PHP and Ruby on Rails. I was curious how many of their pages are actually indexed at Google and I tried to learn more.

Let’s take a look how many pages at NETTUTS are indexed. Note that this will vary from one location to another, as well as ISP used and nearest datacenter used by Google (I’m currently testing this in North America and the count is going to be variable and approximate).

Let’s hit “site:nettuts.com” at Google. They have approximately 588 indexed pages. Now let’s see how many backlinks they have. Let’s hit “link:nettuts.com“. They have approximately 1,400 links going back to them.

The numbers above are not really that much. However, what matters here is when you look at their RSS feed subscriber count, they have 14,400.

So, what’s the point? Sites like NETTUTS still proves that content is king. It doesn’t matter 100% how many pages of your site are indexed at Google, what’s really important is that you deliver quality content to your visitors.

The rest follows.

I only manage my client’s affiliate every weekend and Performics’ ConnectCommerce is down. It’ seems like I’m gonna have to wait for now. Waste of time.

Sigh.

BlogRush, a free service that was created to help bloggers get more readers for their blog just decided to shut down.

This is the email from John Reese:

After careful consideration, we have decided to shutdown the BlogRush service.  If you have the widget code on your blog you will need to remove it.

When BlogRush launched in late-2007 it spread like wildfire all over the Web.  Thousands of bloggers were talking about it and the service exploded to become one of the fastest growing free services in the history of the Web.  During the first year of the service it successfully served 3.4 Billion blog post headlines and the BlogRush widget could be found on blogs all over the world; even up until the moment we closed down the service.

BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected.  We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go.  All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.

Our team worked very hard to try and build a service that would truly help bloggers of all sizes get free traffic to their blogs.  This was our primary focus.  Not once did we ever try to monetize the service with ads or anything else.  BlogRush never made a single penny in revenue.  We wanted to be able to help our users FIRST and then worry about monetizing the service later.  Unfortunately, the service didn’t work out like we had hoped.  (It happens.)

I want to say “Thank You” to all of the great bloggers that at least gave BlogRush a test to see if it would work for them.  We sincerely appreciate you giving the service a try.

We have received several offers & inquiries about acquiring BlogRush, but we are choosing not to go that route.  While many might think this is crazy, we truly feel it’s the ‘right’ thing to do for our users.  Believe it or not, it’s not always about the money.  In fact, BlogRush will have lost a small fortune when it’s all said and done, and it was by choice.  There were many things we could have done to monetize the service but we wanted to make sure it was going to benefit our users first.

Last but not least I want to say that I hope the failure of this service doesn’t in any way discourage other entrepreneurs from coming up with crazy ideas at 4AM (like I did with this one) and from “going for it” to just try and see if something will work.  Without trying there can be no success.  And as we all know, ideas are worthless without action.  The Web wouldn’t be what it is today without entrepreneurs trying all sorts of crazy ideas.

On behalf of the entire BlogRush team, we wish the best of luck to everyone with their own blogs, ideas, and crazy ventures.

Sincerely,

John Reese

I’ve used BlogRush once but never found it helpful to my blog. It was a cool service though. However, even the coolest service these days cannot survive without a bullet-proof business model.

It’s just sad to see another free service go to the dead pool.

Good luck to John and the rest of the BlogRush team.