It's probably somewhat ironic that I'm writing my first code-oriented post about PHP. After all, I'm becoming more of a Rails fanboy the more I learn about it, and putting down PHP is one of my favorite pastimes. That being said, we're about to roll out a Drupal installation over at SexInfo Online, and so at least a cursory knowledge of PHP is required.

So what are we doing here?

I got sick of seeing code that looked like this:

<?php
  while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
    echo "<div class=\"item\">" . $row['field']; . "</div>";
  }
?>

I decided that I needed a utility function similar to Rails' own content_tag method, which allows you to do something like this:

<%= content_tag(:p, "Hello World!", :class => "strong") %>

The function is taking 3 parameters in this case: the type of tag (as a Ruby symbol), the content itself, and optional HTML attributes such as classes or an ID. So let's model our PHP version on this, and write down some sample usage.

// Our end goal:
<?php
  $content = "Hello World!";
  echo content_tag("p", $content, array("class" => "strong"));
  // Should return <p class="strong">Hello World!</p>
?>

Let's go about actually implementing this!

On Wednesday, I went to an information session hosted by the gentlemen over at RingRevenue. They were there to give a presentation about what call performance marketing is all about and share some cool details about their Rails setup on the backend. There was maybe 20 people in the room at most - it was an ideal environment, very laid back and personal. But that's not what I'm writing to talk about - I'm writing to talk about a strange phenomenon that I've seen again and again in that setting. After the end of the presentation, the PowerPoint was turned off and the presenter asked "so, are there any questions?"

Silence.

It's the weirdest thing. Here I am in a room with a bunch of presumably intelligent CS undergrads and some incredibly smart engineers at a neat startup that's working on some big things. And yet, they're met with this awkward air of silence that just kinds of hangs over the room. I've seen this happen before at countless information sessions. And I always wonder what it is that prevents people from asking questions. Is it because there's nothing to ask? Perhaps partially. These guys are here talking about a vastly complicated enterprise-class platform. I didn't even know what "high ROI call performance tracking" meant going into the session. But my guess is that this stunned silence stems from something greater - fear. It's the fear of being singled out, of asking a "dumb question", or just interacting with someone you perceive to be smarter than you are. I've been guilty of it myself; I usually don't like to speak up when I'm in a large group of people. But the result is that you have a room full of people wasting an opportunity that's very literally presenting itself to them.

Even though this is the obligatory 'Hello World' post, it feels like it's been forever since I started work on planning and building this site. In early fall of last year, I was gifted the domain andrewberls.com. I had no particular use for it at the time, but it seemed like a handy thing to hold on to. I decided I wanted to build a portfolio site for myself, to show off a little of what I've done up until this point and shamelessly promote myself. After completing the first iteration while also frantically trying to juggle schoolwork, I decided that the site needed more to it. Everybody has a blog, and I wasn't going to be the exception. I pondered my options- I posted on tumblr for the time being and thought about throwing a Wordpal or Drupal installation onto my domain, but that seemed unexciting. Nobody cares if you can install Wordpress, and I wanted to focus on improving my technical knowledge and abilities rather than actual writing (god forbid) anyways. The result you see here is powered by Sutro, a blogging engine I wrote from scratch using Ruby on Rails.

Going into all of this, I had absolutely no clue what Rails was all about, and had never used most of the tools I needed in any significant application. I had started learning a few snippets of PHP towards the end of the summer, and so the initial application was written in PHP. I started on the portfolio section, and only needed some basic scripting for the Contact form, so it seemed like a good fit. When I decided to write the blogging software as well, it was pretty clear that I would need a better solution, and so I had a good excuse to go learn Rails.

In building this site, I've learned more than I could have possibly imagined. The various features I chose to initially implement forced me to finally learn Ruby and what Rails was all about, the model-view-controller architecture, databases, authentication algorithms, optimization techniques, and some sneaky JavaScript tricks with a healthy dose of jQuery. It's not to say that I didn't know anything about these beforehand, but I'm a firm believer in that the only way to truly learn something is to get your hands dirty and work with it. I decided fairly early on that I wanted to avoid third-party plugins and pre-written code as much as possible. It's not because I don't see their value- to the contrary, I'm an advocate of letting other people do the heavy lifting for you, and believe it to be a best practice - but I wanted to make this a learning experience as much as possible for myself and see what I could accomplish from scratch. Some of the resulting features - slideshows, contact forms, etc, are a little rough around the edges, but they work and I get to say that it's something I wrote.