Phly, boy, phly
the weblog and site of Matthew Weier O'Phinney

2007 was a busy year, both personally and professionally. I won't go into the personal too much, because, well, it's personal, and some of the details are simply inappropriate for blogging material.

Here's the short version:

• One trip to Belgium and The Netherlands.
• Two trips to Israel.
• Two trips to Atlanta, GA (not counting the return trip from Europe, when I was stranded for a day due to storms in the Northeast).
• Three different user groups attended, with three presentations.
• One major Zend Framework release
• One PEAR release.
• One podcast.
• One webinar.
• One book published.
• One conference attended.

What follows is my month-by-month breakdown:

Over the past few evenings, I've refactored File_Fortune to have it implement Iterator, Countable, and ArrayAccess -- basically allowing it to act like an array for most intents and purposes. As a result, I've eliminated the need for the File_Fortune_Writer package, and greatly simplified the usage.

(Note: sure, File_Fortune may not be that big of a deal, but over 1000 downloads in the past two years indicates somebody is using it. Plus, it powers the random quotes on the family website. )

As some examples:

All-in-all, it's a much better interface. Lesson learned: when porting code from other languages, it pays to take some time and determine if there might be a better API in your own.

In upcoming releases, I hope to modify the backend to use PHP's Streams API instead of direct file access, and also to allow providing a list of fortune files explicitly. After that, I should be ready for the initial stable release.

Update (2007-07-10): fixed parse error in examples