Sorry for the long absence, I've been trying to balance my time in the last few months given a new job, which requires me to wake up at crazy, unheard of hours (well, for me). To avoid the potential rainfall of scorn, I will abstain from providing details as to what that specific hour may be.

The job is going well, thanks for asking, I'll provide more details in the near future should things work out as expected. But first, a few updates:

Happy New Year! Yes I've been largely absent from posting, and for that I apologize to my 3 somewhat dedicated readers. I took the opportunity to have a bit of a break, and of course, partake in the sacred Canadian winter tradition: watching the world juniors.

I hope you got fun, exciting presents for Christmas (if that's your thing). Or at least, a fun exciting sock, tie, odd ornamental piece you're not sure if you'll ever take out of your closet of "stuff" again.

I know it's somewhat fashionable to hate on Digg, and admittedly, it hasn't been in my RSS reader* for many years now. In case you don't believe me, I recently completed a scientific survey** via Google to prove my point.

• Digg Hate (10,700,000 results)
• Reddit Hate (6,600,000 results)
• Christmas Hate (4,230,000 results)

I know building a javascript fueled image gallery isn't exactly original, but I wanted an excuse to play around with jQuery a bit more. You can see the result here, which hopefully shows up in IE7*.

I'm not really that thrilled with paying for another copy of Windows, when I have an XP disk and Parallels lying around. If only I could find the license for it...

I collected a bit of information from mod_rewrite "fun" over the years at stackoverflow, but then figured I'd post it here too, since I've been a bit lax about writing. Don't worry though (because I know you are), I have a few things in the pipes, including the next article in our MVC bare bones framework series, and my take on a drupal based image gallery.

I was excited to find out my pretend best friend plays dodgeball too. Of course, in our pretend life we both play, but it's always good when real life overlaps pretend life too. The easy thing to do at this point is to write me off as crazy, but I think you should read on a bit before coming to that conclusion.

As promised, we'll take a complete tour through the process of building a bare bones MVC framework in PHP. The goal of this series of articles is to explain MVC principles and design patterns in a useful way. This information is aimed at PHP programmers who are familiar with object oriented PHP, and have heard of, or poked around frameworks, MVC basics, and other design patterns, but are unsure how it all ties together. With all that out of the way, let's start with examining the concepts we'll cover.

Design patterns we'll cover in this introduction:

So that shiny new macbook the SO was so breathlessly waiting for? It lasted a whole 10 minutes before choking on itself. All that anticipation for a slender, eye-catching doorstop.

It was about time to put on a fresh coat of paint on the site, seeing as the old style was just some theme I found. Unfortunately, I really hate design. Well, to be fair, I really enjoy design, I just hate doing it. When it comes down to it, I'm really not that great at it, and the simplest of tasks end up taking a long time, or not looking the way I want it to.

Yes, I realize the title makes absolutely no sense, but really, you should be used to that by now.

Pagination (Node) has a new release (6.x-1.2), and you can read all about the fun additions there.