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Flexibility is Overrated: Having a ton of features isn’t great, it’s information overload. The geeks will always ask you for more - resist. Reduce decision making to a minimum. At any page of your application the user should only see the features relevant to the current context, not the application as a whole. Web applications are like story-boards: the user is meant to navigate them, being assisted as much as possible at every step. Read the rest of this entry »

Developing extate I’ve realized how disorganized database access is in PHP. So I’ve developed SDBA - a simple database abstraction layer for PHP. You’ve probably heard of ADOdb, PEAR DB, etc, and already concluded that they are not worth the time (to learn) or performance issues that come with them. Simple Database Abstraction is different. Click here to learn more and download the first release.

The real estate search engine I’ve been working on for the past few months is now ready for (beta) action. Check it out, and let me know what you think. The engine uses a spider (written in C#, works under mono of course) to crawl some large agents (UK only for now) and extracts property information into a MySQL database. I’ve attempted to stick to LAMP environment as much as possible, except for the spider itself (although it would be interesting to implement it in PHP some day, as it is not performance focused). Everything is highly automated: crawling is done in many cases just by pointing the spider to the site, and I’m about to automate extraction completely.

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