I was curious if anyone has any experience with Multivariate (A/B) testing with PHP Frameworks.  I found http://phpabtest.com/ yesterday, but I haven’t heard of anyone using it in production yet. Nor have I been able to gather how easily or well it integrates with Symfony, or other frameworks that introduce some level of caching.

Here’s what I’d like to measure.

1. How often I showed the blue sign up button on a page.
2. How often people clicked on that blue sign up button (currently I’m using event tracking..)

That’s basically it for now, I was thinking of firing off a custom variable into google analytics everytime I showed a specific variation, but I don’t have the backend logic to show the different variations an equal number of times. It would just a rand() call.. This smells very wrong, so I was curious what the rest of the community was using

PS: I’ve used Google Website optimizer for basic A/B tests of landing pages, but multivariate tests make the management and markup within the views unmanageable… unless someone has an interesting framework already in place..

I’ve been exchanging some emails with my good friend Bobby Freeman. We’ve been discussing some copy and design for a new project I’ve launched, and am looking to share with the rest of the world. He pointed me to the best web design guide ever. I’d like to share it with all of you, I have this printed and on my wall now. Thanks Bobby.

When I was growing up in India, we had to take “computer programming” courses in 5th grade.  At that time they taught us a language called Logo . Making a turtle draw concentric circles was easy, so my friends and I figured out how to get out of what was then an IDE, into qbasic so we could play Gorilla.

Once we figured out how to get out of Logo, word grew throughout the school that some of us had figured out how to do it, other kids asked us how to do it.  Then, one of us had the idea of making the computer beep every time the teacher said “sheet”.. (you have to be North Indian, be able to identify a south indian accent, and be a 5th grader to get the joke.. trust me).

Once the beeps got old and annoying, a girl asked if it was possible to make the computer “sing”. long story short.. we figured that part out just in time for christmas, and most of the computers were singing Jingle Bells.

So in summary, we had 5 steps.

1. Phase 1 – Get out of Logo (notice that you have an itch)
2. Phase 2 – Get out of Logo (itch scratched, tell people about it)
3. Phase 3 – People ask you to help them get out of Logo (lunch money)
4. Phase 4 – Censor the teacher (show students what else can be done)
5. Phase 5 – Girl (High value customer) asks for a feature (get the girl) (to my wife, I don’t even remember her name.. seriously)..

Now, I’m 31, and there’s a new girl I’m trying to get. I need to do what I did in 5th grade, to get this girl as well, I don’t know why I’ve been doing everything but that.  I’d be willing to bet, I can do it in 4 steps now.

My apologies to Ron Burgundy for the title of the post, but I’m just a fan of the wisest man to ever live.

It’s not for you.

You, being the average PHP developer, systems administrator, hacker.  A lot is being made of how CPU load went down by 50% etc, that’s a great number and on the surface very hard to argue with, but to really understand it, you must understand the problem a lot better. Facebook didn’t decide to write HipHop and use it in production because they had all this money laying around and felt like paying 3 engineers to work on something. They looked at other existing alternatives, implemented them, and when they maxed them out, decided to switch.

HipHop Does Not:

If anything, HipHop should be your last resort.

But, it’ll help me reduce the number of web heads!

The past month or so has given us a lot of blog posts on how, and why we should use automated build and deploy systems.
One of the best deployment systems out there (imho), is by the Ruby community, and it’s called Capistrano. We’ve been using it internally since this summer to manage and deploy our Symfony application with great success. I’ll be sharing the methodology to “Capify” a Symfony project soon, but first I wanted to share the WordPress-Capistrano project.

The goals of the project are:

1. Make deployment and upgrades of WordPress easier for multiple installs of wordpress on multiple hosts
2. Secure WordPress in production by setting stricter permissions, to prevent SQL/XSS attacks that modify PHP files.
3. Allow one to easily manage the 3 tiered development cycle, but with WordPress
4. Make deployment of WordPress simpler on the Rackspace Cloud
5. Synchronization of WordPress stages (move db from production to stage, push configuration settings to production)

Currently, you can clone the repository, configure wordpress locally, setup your Capistrano recipe and start deploying.

I’ve tried to comment out the recipes, but I’m sure I need to do a better job. Feel free to ask me any questions, post issues and patches.

I’m also looking into the Moonshine project, and perhaps forking it to be independent of Rails, I’m really digging it’s ease of use and depth of features.

I don’t have much to add to this, this just a great post. It explains the  ‘release early, release often’ mantra very well.  As an entrepreneur who’s busy building/fine tuning and releasing his own application to the world, this is a great refresher.  I don’t know what I’m doing, the past 4 months lay out the case for that very well. And this post reminds me, that it’s ok, as long as I’m willing to learn from it.  I would add that usertesting.com is a great site, service and definitely needs to be very high on your priority list. Especially if you don’t have hundreds of users going to your product.

A lot of people confuse the terms URLs and URIs. This morning, the PHP Advent post by David Sklar exemplified that. Paul Reinheimer already has a rebuttal for this, and I’m expecting many more.

I agree with Paul, David seems to be missing the point.

• URI: Uniform Resource Identifier/Indicator
• URL: Uniform Resource Locator

The keyword here is IDENTIFIER. Just because you know the identifier, doesn’t mean you know the content/topic yet. An Identifier is normally used by machines to find out where to go. URL Shortening services produce URIs by default, but offer the ability to create URLs. Take for example: http://tinyurl.com/yj432kb and http://tinyurl.com/thirdpartycode . The first one is a URI, a human has no clue what it’s about. The second one, you can guess what it’s about.

The fact that they both end up at the same location may make you think that human readable urls aren’t important, but as the number of shortened urls grow, and the number of services providing these urls grow, we’ll need some way of knowing what’s NSFW, what’s taking you to a phishing site, or what’s just a prank site. As this happens, the chances of someone clicking on jy32kb vs clicking on /thirdpartycode decreases, because people will get burnt too often.

I’m already seeing security teams blocking emails containing tinyurls, twitter clients have the ability to display the end url in your view. URLs do matter, even if they point to the same site, www.cnn.com looks a lot more trustworthy than http://tinyurl.com/4qz

Sure, I can manipulate URLs to give a false sense of security, or to try and fool the search engines. But that’s a different topic, and is already being addressed by search engines

I was trying come up with something along the lines of Snakes on a plane..I failed.. but still.. this post comes to you from 24,000 feet in the air. Courtesy of Gogo inflight, that provides Wifi in the air . Speedtest.net shows a 2mb download with a decent 512k upload.

This is pretty cool, as I’m sitting here going through preparing an RFP for a client, and chatting with them about it at the same time.

I’m glad they got the Wifi/Internet thing working faster than in flight calls, obvious law enforcement/big brother concerns are easy to address with internet, as opposed to voice calls and the multitude of service providers.

For people who want privacy, keep in mind, the TOS gets explicit rights to monitor your activities even if they claim to not block anything. It’s technically childs play to setup a simple transparent proxy that logs EVERYTHING… use SSL/SSH when needed (anytime you enter your password).

Overall I’m very impressed with the quality of service, and for $13 (after a free trial per email address…) I’d love to see this on more airlines, I know Virgin air has had wifi on their flights for a while, but they don’t even acknowledge my home airport on their website..

Oh I’m flying American Airlines right now..and if others don’t have Wifi, this definitely gives them an advantage the next time I fly somewhere.

A new concept for iStockPhoto called iStockPhoto Logos has been announced as a direct competitor to Brandstack. Will iStockPhoto Logos fail again?

Techcrunch just announced iStockPhoto Logos? . It seems this is a great idea that was pioneered by Brandstack. The concept both sites have is very similar, in that they both sell logos, but right now, I think logo designs by Brandstack is the better choice.

Advantage of Brandstack for designers

• You can submit a logo today on Brandstack. No need to wait till January 2010 for iStockPhoto Logos
• Work with your peers, Brandstack is full of excellent designers, who have been designing logos for a long time
• You get to keep $850 from your sale, (iStockPhoto Logos takes $500 out of every $1000), while Brandstack only keeps $150
• You put a value to your work, the iStockPhoto Logo folks seem to want to manipulate the market, and decide what your logo is worth, which sounds fairly draconian.

Brandstack advantage for buyers / consultants like me

• You can buy a logo design from Brandstack today.
• You can work with the designers to tweak the designs before you buy them.

I’m really looking forward to see what happens with iStockphoto’s Logos, I’ve never met a photographer that was good at design, composing a good photo is not the same as designing a good logo.

Goal: Build a PHP 5.3 package, that I can install and upgrade on new ubuntu slices as needed, without having to compile on each box.

This is an amalgamation of different blog posts that did certain things really well, but not everything I wanted. The post I refer to specifically Installing PHP 5.3 on Ubuntu by Brandon Savage .

Prep your system

Setup your development server to be able to compile things. By default, most installations will not come with compilers installed.

apt-get install checkinstall

Say yes, and let it follow the dependencies as needed.

Get the development headers for some of the extensions you’ll be compiling in.

apt-get install postgresql-8.3 postgresql-client-8.3 postgresql-client-common postgresql-common postgresql-server-dev-8.3
aptitude install mysql-client mysql-client-5.0	mysql-common mysql-server mysql-server-5.0 mysql-server-core-5.0

apt-get install libtidy-dev curl libcurl4-openssl-dev libcurl3 libcurl3-gnutls zlib1g zlib1g-dev libxslt1-dev libzip-dev libzip1 libxml2 libsnmp-base libsnmp15 libxml2-dev libsnmp-dev libjpeg62	libjpeg62-dev libpng12-0 libpng12-dev zlib1g zlib1g-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev libbz2-dev libxpm4-dev libmcrypt-dev libmcrypt4

Download PHP and Compile it

mkdir ~/srcs
cd ~/srcs

wget http://us3.php.net/get/php-5.3.0.tar.gz/from/this/mirror
tar xvfz php-5-3-0.tar.gz
cd php-5.3.0

Now, you can either do the ./configure –help and pick your options, or you can use my configure options for PHP 5.3

make
make test

checkinstall

checkinstall will ask you some basic questions about the package, answer and let it build the package for you. You will run into an interesting issue at first, apxs2 will complain about a LoadModule not being in the httpd.conf file. This is an artifact of how Ubuntu/Debian likes to handle it’s configuration files. The simplest thing is to add a line at the bottom of your httpd.conf that loads a benign module. Mod Pony seems cute .

Configure your PHP like any normal apache server. Reload apache, put the handy phpinfo(); in your documentroot, and then have fun.
Be sure to remove the phpinfo(); from your production servers.

If you want MySQL 5.1, just do apt-get install mysql-server-5.1 , be sure to change the dev header packages to the same version as well.