PHP time

Given that a bunch of my friend have their websites written in PHP, I decided it was time to learn some rudimentary PHP to accomplish some basic server side goals while working on the Bush League of Nations website. We wanted an "email this page" system and I figured that PHP is going to be the easiest way to accomplish that.

On Wednesday night, I was at a talk by PHP creator Rasmus Lerdof at Yahoo!. He is one of those engineers who has the right combination of laziness and brillance that he'll build a tool to fill a problem. He's lead a wild life from birth in Greenland to Denmark, then Canada, a few years in Brazil and then to PHP. His life proves that you don't need to know where you are going or have any plans at all.

Rasmus had some good points about why people contribute to open source projects and how open source projects are very similar to the 2.0 web in the sense that users supply most of the content and that these users are driven by 4 things:

Self intrest
Building their recognition
Hormones
Trying to change the world

Maybe this isn't the most accurate list of 4 things that drive people to network on the web, but he made some good points. He attributed the success of PHP to completely solving an important problem, having lots of first class documentation, and allowing contributors to have latitude in how things are implemented.

I have to admit, this talk helped inspire me to get the PHP work done! So go to the Bush League of Nations site and start emailing your friends!