The gap of 5000 readers have just been exceeded today with 5015 subscriptions at Ajax Magazine. Big thanks for everyone who contributed to the magazine and make it successful. The last months I wasn’t writing much news on Ajax industry as before, but I have really a lot of articles in the queue waiting to get finalized and published. There is also a new book coming in December on Django, and probably others. Ajax magazine was one of the very first blog launched on PHP Magazine Network in June 2005, and until today I’m really happy with its results.
The latest Open Handset Magazine is just 18 days old and count already 94 subscriptions. My favorite french IT network ITACTU still not on the top, even the website code is still in beta tests, but I’m counting a lot on it for the next years.
As usual I’m spending few time off from my perso blog, but not totally off. This month was pretty busy and many things happened together, starting from my friend Salah who is leaving the team where I’m currently working by the end of this month, my vacations getting closer, … I have a lots of tech news to announce but after vacations and can’t tell anymore about it at this time. The only thing that I’m worrying about is taking the responsibility of the IT team here, even that I used to during Salah’s absence.
The good news that by next month I’ll be starting a new life, as some of you already know that I’m getting married. So I hope to fix any issue here and there before mid-August so I can be completely off for some good vacations, better called honeymoon 
I’ll just keep an eye on hostphp.org server in case anything wrong happened, I have putty installed on my N80 for quick access.
Hostphp is currently hosting more than 50 websites, and the most busy one is wikimobs.com which currently serving more than 1million page views monthly, followed by phpmagazine.net with half a million page views monthly. Did I mention that Sadri started a new blog at BrainFault.com ? not at hostphp, but just for info 
Yesterday the server encountered a pretty long downtime which wasn’t very common. The problem as usual “WikiMobs”. I disable it temporarily until fixing memory issues. I have updated the service Tuesday, and after that the traffic increased considerably, and probably attracted some annoyance with it. Pageviews was averaging 20′000 per day in the beginning of the June, and now it’s more than 80′000. If it continue in this way it’s going to exceed 2Millions pageviews per month which is huge and definitely require server upgrade.
Anyway currently everything seems to be working fine. We’ll try to get more things done in the next hours.
This is not an official announcement of the service, but our Jobs section is finally up and you can notice a link to Jobs below every post that I’m testing here. I have been working on this since November 2006, but after a recent interview with Keith Schacht, JobCoin CEO, I decided to switch their solution. It’s easy to customize, have the basic features and there is more advanced features coming, in addition to the distribution through widgets and feeds. Most important for me is to make the service work online so we can focus on other internal projects.
I’m also glad that JobCoin are adding many custom features for phpmagazine.net, this will help us to get maximum profit from the service and certainly all others publishers will profit from this in the future. JobCoin and many startups will assist in the Chicago beta meetup for entrepreneurs and web 2.0 companies on February 28, so if you are around this something very interesting do not miss.
Check : PHP Magazine Job Board
This is the first clone that really make mad today, I took the screenshot below from a website called phpmagazine.org which is simply stealing phpmagazine.net logo. If you visit the website it may take you in confusion, I don’t care for the layout design, menus and the way it’s organized but please don’t steal our logo !! I send a message via their contact page, and hope to have an answer because seriously I don’t want to make a legal case, but I will!
The logo in question was created in April 2006 by Rob, and you can find the new phpmagazine.net logo announcement here
Update : the DNS point to a certain CEOTEX.com website, and with some luck the whois isn’t protected. The domain owner is a certain Maher Ahmed, from Egypt. It’s almost 1am here, and I’m really tired, hungry, and sleepy but expect a call from me tomorrow morning inchallah.
Domain name: CEOTEX.COM
Registrant Contact:
Racku, Inc.
Maher Ahmed (maher2day@yahoo.com)
136 Algomhuria Street
Mansoura, NA 35516
EG
+1.20104800485
Fax:+1.20104800485
Update : I called today Maher Ahmed, who confirmed that he own the domain name and the website. He told me that the design is temporary and it’s going to be changed.
I can confirm that it’s difficult to do something legal in such cases, but there is lots of alternatives from closing the domain, hosting account and so on. Since hosting company is US based, laws are very strict, and it’s mentioned with details in TOS. But it’s always better to resolve it a l’amiable.
Update 2 : I checked today the link, the logo have been removed and replaced with another one. Issue resolved.
AJAX Magazine got the scoop this week to announce Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder 0.9.16.1 even before Morfik itself. There is a complete coverage on three parts including different features of the AJAX IDE and technology used :
Tomorrow there will be a tutorial on how to create a simple application in the Morfik IDE, and there will be probably a part 4 and 5 later on Morfik architecture and business usage.
I have updated yesterday to the latest MT 3.34, while I was using a beta CSV version of the software, but what’s new is that I heard a lot about FastCGI recently and was excited to give it a try not only for MT, but also for PHP as many developers announced excellent performance.
Until now I have just recompiled Apache, PHP with FastCGI support. The issue I noticed in compile from documentation is that the default apxs always fail to compile mod_fastcgi, so I used another local version situated at /usr/local/apache/bin/apxs. I opted for changing cgi handler to mod_fastcgi from server, but MT was enable to work properly. I didn’t want to change URL structure so if you get it working that would be really great.
I find it a little funny that two top stories on PHPMagazine.net today are about Microsoft :
This have been said, Microsoft declared quarterly dividend, a dividend of $0.10 per share payable in March. I’m not sure if that’s lot of money for shareholders.
Yesterday with the new Video and Podcasts features launched, Digg was down for the first time for more than two hours. You can see in the screenshot below Digg stuff recommending few reading until servers will be back.
And I just noticed today that I have been Dugg again, a post written in May 2006 on Firefox magazine. This is really great because I wanted to be sure if the new server will support high traffic or no, and happily it did served 9,996 unique visitors yesterday only and 14,352 page views. With all this, Digg contributed with only 28,77% of the whole traffic that’s Big. But still 40.58% of the traffic coming from Google.
Due to a spam attack this week and yesterday, I used to disable comments over the network temporarily and enable it again with some changes. So if you have posted comments between yesterday and today and the system told you that its awaiting moderation it is not, it is not and the comment have just been lost sorry. I have written a fast fix for the mt-comments.cgi but for an unknown reason the MT code still executed before my fix, I’m still investigating on this issue but sincerely I can’t understand how both codes could be executed in the if else clause. Any idea ?
if ( $referer =~ '' or $referer !~ m|^http://(.*).$hostname/| ) {
ban($visitor_ip);
} else {
use strict;
use lib $ENV{MT_HOME} ? "$ENV{MT_HOME}/lib" : 'lib';
use MT::Bootstrap App => 'MT::App::Comments';
}
Comments are now enabled again and hope this will be fixed before the next spam attack.
