There are a lot of happy people because of the announcement that Microsoft and Nokia will use jQuery in their products.

Count me in!

A quick tip: use a CDN when you include jQuery in your project. e.g.:

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js

As Google states “Once we host a release of a given library, we are committed to hosting that release indefinitely“.

It’s also a good time to thank Yoeri from Yappa who told me about jQuery almost 2 years ago.

Lets say the unlikely occurs: you have too much spare time and you want to come up with a great idea to build your next “web 2.0″ project around. Of course you need an idea that will (at some time) generate revenue. I mean: everything but the next Twitter.

This could get you going: have a look at subjects you’re interested in yourself. The obvious ones: your hobbies, your education, your work,… or something you’ve always wanted to do. It’s a good thing if you already know a lot about the subject. That cuts costs in getting content and of course shines off in the actual result.

Some guidelines when picking a subject/sector:

• An outlined niche is always good: the bigger the audience, the bigger your project will be.
• It’s easier when your audience is already accustomed to the web, but there may be less competition in “emerging” markets.
• Evaluate competition but do not let them dispose a perfectly good idea.

Take that subject and have a look where money transfers from one person or company to another. If no money is involved, it may be good to stay away (watch out for the Twitter-syndrome).

Now think about what you can create to:

• Improve/enhance the way “business” is done.
• Raise the income that is made out of each action.
• Make the whole process easier.

Depending on the subject you chose, that should not be that hard at all.

And that’s it: if you picked a good subject you should already be motivated and full of ideas. Just find a nice URL and get going!

Some examples of projects along this line: flickr, Adwords, eBay, Basecamp, Blinksale, Copilot, SeoMoz,…

Like recently proposed by Jason Eisenmenger, I’ve written a Zend_Pagination adapter for Propel.

It uses the DbFinder symfony plugin (formerly sfPropelFinder) which mimics Doctrine’s way of performing queries. The strictlyPHP_Propel_Finder used below is just a wrapper around that plugin.

Please note: it can certainly be improved (and I’m not sure the Zend Framework coding standards are met).

class strictlyPHP_Paginator_Adapter_Propel implements
Zend_Paginator_Adapter_Interface
{
    /**
     * @var strictlyPHP_Propel_Finder
     */
    protected $_finder;

    /**
     * @var Criteria
     */
    protected $_criteria;

    /**
     * @var int
     */
    protected $_count;

    /**
     * Constructor
     * @param strictlyPHP_Propel_Finder $finder
     */
    public function __construct($finder)
    {
        $this->_finder = $finder;
        $this->_criteria = $finder->getCriteria();
    }

    /**
     * Get count
     * @return int
     */
    public function count()
    {
         if ($this->_count === null) {
             $this->_finder->setCriteria($this->_criteria);
            $this->_count = $this->_finder->count();
         }

        return $this->_count;
    }

    /**
     * Get items
     * @param int $pageNumber
     * @param int $itemCountPerPage
     * @return array
     */
    public function getItems($pageNumber, $itemCountPerPage)
    {
        $criteria = clone $this->_criteria;
        $criteria->setOffset($pageNumber);
        $criteria->setLimit($itemCountPerPage);
        return $this->_finder->setCriteria($criteria)->find();
    }
}

When you have finally built the next best thing in Web 2.0-land and are looking for more customers, visitors, subscribers,… maybe this approach can help you.

You have probably built your project with a specific audience in mind (if for some unexplainable reason you did not, take time to think of that now and evaluate if everything still aligns!). Now use the web to get lists of that target groups’ contact details.

Let’s say your customers are small businesses. Try looking for lists of their certifications: they always like to mention their contact details (just like you need to do yourself). Or if you are looking for people that like to travel, use social networking sites to pull out lists of people that indicated they like visiting specific countries.

The concept is: there are lists of contact details for almost everything. Think about where your prospects gather. The only thing you need to do afterwards is go through them and contact them. As personal as possible. It doesn’t harm to get a good copywriter (Dutch) to create an attractive e-mail or letter of course.

Even with an average success rate of 5%, that can be more rewarding than “lazy” alternatives like Google Adwords because you are 100% certain the people you contact are your audience.

Let’s just hope they take the bait!

Looking at SSH accounts developers use a lot, there are more advantages to Enso.

If you use PuTTY for SSH connections and you have a saved session which ideally looks like username@host, you can make a Windows shortcut to PuTTY which you edit and save with this Target:

"C:\Program Files\PuTTY\putty.exe" -load "session_name"

Then select the shortcut on your desktop or wherever you placed it and give Enso the learn as open session_name command.

There you go: opening an SSH session is now as quick as holding SHIFT LOCK, typing open session_name and entering your password.

Whether you’re looking for a sandbox environment or your own server farm, virtual server solutions like Linode.com or Slicehost offer a great solution.

I’ve been using Linode for 2 months now and I use it primarily as a test environment to increase my Linux knowledge (which I must admit, is very basic). With Ubuntu server installed and apt-get, even my grandmother can get it up & running.

The cool thing about their setup is that you can reinstall any of the main Linux-distro’s with a single click over and over again. Together with their DNS manager that is all you need to start hosting anything.

The downside of services like these is that you have to take care of everything yourself, including backup’s. So for business critical needs, I still trust the world’s most flexible hosting company.

Before I ordered an account, I’ve quickly compared Linode to some competitors (mainly SliceHost) but I couldn’t find a reason to choose for either one of them so I just decided to go for Linode 360 because they had a slightly better offer.

Linode now has a referral system, so if you ever think of getting an account, you may always be so kind to give me a $20 discount: http://www.linode.com/?r=408d1cd9a3c5a16fc3a5202370869dfb8bc78fee

I guess the author probably didn’t predict that FPDF, the free PDF generation library for PHP, would be used by a huge amount of projects 7 years after it’s inception.

Although it’s recommended to use something like UFPDF or Zend_Pdf with UTF-8 support, it’s notable how many websites still use FPDF. The package, until recently, hasn’t been updated in the last 4 years.

Last month though, Olivier Plathey suddenly released a new version (1.6) with some important bugfixes and features. Time to upgrade!

If this is a start of more bugfixes/new releases, a subversion repository would be nice.

Steven pointed me to Guy Kawasaki who wrote a short but inspiring post about entrepreneurship in general.

Venture capitalists like Guy seem to be rare or unexisting in mainland Europe as far as I know. You have business angels who do invest but rarely in Web 2.0 entrepreneurs.

Well… it may be even better to do it all by yourself if you can. And on the web, you can.

A recommendation to get even more motivated: Getting Real by 37signals.

Like half the world probably did today, I also installed Google’s new browser.

They promised it to be fast but in comparison to FireFox 3 (and of course Internet Explorer 7) it seems lightning fast. I don’t know what causes this but I guess it is also reinforced by how quick all menu’s and tabs pop up. In the end, they can only control part of how fast a page loads.

It’s astonishing though how good sites still look. After using it for a few hours I haven’t found any deviations in site layouts between FireFox and Chrome. If you made the same comparison between FireFox and a new Internet Explorer most developers started to cry.

One remark though: as I already said, I need a dual-display in which I maximize windows and Chrome for some reason can only be maximize across both screens.
Edit: some Facebook JavaScript also does not seem to work. I guess this won’t be an urgent one ;-).

Almost perfect.

Although, as a developer, I can’t be extremely thrilled with a new kid on the block, in the end I must admit it looks like it will make many people’s web experience more fun. And since their zero pagerank site now is on top of their own search engine results (above much higher ranked sites) I guess it’s market share will steadily grow in the next weeks.

Some sites I came across this year (and don’t remember how):

• Wufoo: a form creation service which offers all possible features if you ever need to create a HTML form for any purpose.
• Presdo: an appointment/meeting scheduling service from one of the creators of LinkedIn. Although I haven’t really tried it, it sounds useful.
• Moo: a service for all your printing needs. Endless possibilities. And they are not expensive.