Latest / Hemispheric Views / 125: I Became One With PHP!
Transcript
- Okay so as i was saying we have the interchange file format iff that was an amiga format back in the day it had audio it had graphics it was interchangeable so it was a sort of a common file format that could containerize different content then apple had the aiff and i and as we were talking about wave was kind of like the windows thing clearly microsoft i have memories of wave with sound blaster yeah i just checked it's uh wave was a product of ibm and microsoft together in 1991 wait who was that just now that did not sound like martin at all that was that was not an australian accent that i've ever heard what month is it nope nope not not an australian accent oh it's november is it november or is it neatvember fanfare fanfare fanfare it's our favorite time of the year well a second second favorite because i think we like arcadia june more but neatvember is good too you neatvember remains a show in our lineup adam newbold welcome to the show you're back thanks for having me i'm back i made it this is uh the fourth i think it's the fourth because i think it started the very first year i believe if i'm remembering correctly it's been a long time the third or fourth i can't count to four so it's it's it's three or four it's close it's either three or four depending on if we started at zero or one we'll just say that it does mean we've been doing this show for an awfully long time still waiting for those that mass viewership crunch to hit us you know that will make us our fortune any day now but we keep plugging along adam you must feel this i mean you've advanced beyond hemisphere views with your creations you've gone from your small startup to tech titan wouldn't you say no hardly i i i appreciate the the notion that anyone can be a anyone would would think of me or or the stuff that i do like that but uh i have to i have to politely maintain the the accurate record here i i am uh pretty much the same bag of small potatoes that i've always been um i have not expanded past atmospheric views this is the only podcast i've ever been on probably the only one i ever will be on and i'm totally happy with that i wouldn't have it any other way to be honest um but no yeah i'm i'm i'm still podcasting i'm still podcasting i'm still puttering along and still balancing um my nights and weekends stuff with my my fairly demanding day job and uh having a lot of fun with all of it so so for those who don't know like go listen to previous neat fember episodes but perhaps just give us a rundown of what's in the uh what's in the portfolio these days that people might recognize yeah so mostly uh the the sort of big energy gravity well i guess would be um omg.lol or omg.lol uh if we if we tune back to the the first neat member we discussed the the pronunciation um and yeah that that sort of continues to be this assortment of little internet things that i still don't quite know how to describe or how to how to articulate um actually someone and i feel bad i wish i could remember who this was so i could give them credit here right now um maybe show notes later or something but somebody asked me a question actually sent me an email sometime over the past year and they they had the perfect way to describe it they were like hey i was talking to a friend about omg.lol and i explained it as um a bbs adjusted for inflation and i heard that and i was like hey that's actually really good that that really works a lot of people don't know what bbs's are but but for the people who do i think it it might click i think you just hit the the andrew venn diagram there of bbs as one and and and financial terms in another circle and it's just his face right in the middle it's already business corner time i guess that is a great description maybe you could have a little easter egg somewhere on your website so if you click the button you get the modem sounds oh yeah the modem sounds that so many of us grew up with and just occasionally when you try to log in just just return a error saying sorry line's busy try again later the bank of modems is full we could add something where uh it's like your mom picks up the phone line while you're while you're connected and you just sort of randomly get dropped that could be off dad get off the phone i'm online it's time to come down for dinner adam we've all been there that's the worst when they when your parents learned that just all they had to do was pick up any phone in the house and that would basically end everything you were doing yeah for a while they didn't quite understand quite get it but then they learned oh all i have to do is just do this that ruins anything they're doing and they're gonna have to just come down anyways like so my biggest nerd achievement at that young age was i actually got a second line installed into the house directly into my bedroom so i had my own phone number specifically for modems and connections wow yeah yeah i don't did the same thing i still remember the phone number what is it do you want to share it 39398 4420 yeah give it a call see what happens now it's just modem sound it sounds like a fax machine yeah i wound up with with my own line as well as a teenager and it was it was it just came together at the perfect moment because i wanted it really badly and it turns out my parents wanted it really badly as well because they were tired of me hogging the uh phone line for all my bbsing back in the day so yeah that that was a that was a swift and sort of mutual setup at that point it does make you wonder how many phone calls were going on back then as well that you couldn't tie up the phone line because people had to call and get through there would be no there must have been a lot of calls back and forth you never make calls anymore do we nobody wants to nobody wants to make them nobody wants to get them so i think having your own phone line back then would be like having like fiber now or something like that's like the closest equivalent i can think of of having like ultimate connectivity i remember lusting after an is is the isdn i think that was the one oh yeah yeah i never got that yep isdn that was like what a quarter of a t1 line or something like that i don't know it was some fraction of a t1 line and or maybe not i don't know that's some some random fact that i stuck away at some point i probably got it wrong oh the t1 line oh that was like man if you could have one of those you were like it so it's been a pleasure joining old farts computer corner you i hope the kids out there are enjoying this walk down memory lane i think we said at least like 15 terms that just don't even make sense to basically anyone at this point even fax machine is probably like oh what what are you talking about um can i do some administrative uh activities here up front before we get too far into uh old tech corner first of all something that is not old but new evergreen really i think uh one prime plus maybe you've heard of it if you haven't get on your t1 line and fire up hemisphericfuse.com uh we've got a new one prime plus member now i'm gonna i'm gonna get i'm gonna let andrew do this okay because i feel like he will mispronounce it better oh yeah i'm the bad guy okay one prime plus member ramiz n ramiz we thank you for your support there it is if you want to be a one prime plus member where would you go to do such an activity you would go to one prime plus.com i believe you would have to because it is in fact in the long game it is yeah you know one of the things i sometimes do with one prime plus is offend members straight away regarding your name and that's should i do it for ramiz just well i mean you're editing so you can always edit it out i could i could look it's only a little one it's a bit silly because this is short notice it's just off the top of my head but what if uh what if ramiz has a cold and then ramiz did a sneeze and then he had a wheeze wow wow and then he fell to his knees what mom's spaghetti okay i think that's staying in i don't see any reason to cut that out that seems that's if anything's gonna he'll probably or this person will probably like raise get another membership why wouldn't you i would i would have at least no less than three memberships is really i think the sweet spot and if you don't have a membership or don't want a membership which that's crazy but let's just say you don't um what if you wanted a sticker to slap on your new fancy device that you got this year or are getting for christmas or you could slap it on your car uh on a on a bus i'm not condoning putting stickers where you know maybe they're not allowed but you can do what you want to do uh go ahead and get stickers at msforacuse.com we've got plenty i got a fresh batch of orders in so we are restocked come and get them stickers are available we should probably do some kind of sale should we do a sale we could do it wait sure are you are you are you okay with sales is that is this like a slash save situation can we do can you not blog slash save to get some amount off of our own sale we're just cutting our gross margin so i'm not a big fan oh i like it when others cut their gross margin and i benefit you're doing it wrong jason what if we raise the price now reverse black friday and we double the price of all the stickers slash spend okay we'll do that it'll be hemispheric views.com slash spend and you'll pay double what they would normally be so there you go that is all the administrative uh items i have for the front matter life has been very busy for me and i feel like i just want to put a little comment out to all the people all the the listeners of this show the people in the discord um the omg lol family and particularly the one prime plussians in that i haven't been producing a lot of plus content recently um as i said moved house um been work has just been ridiculous it's like they they pay me money and then they expect me not only to show up each day but to do a lot during the day as well it's you know they're asking a lot it's taking it out of me it's leaving very little free time so i look i don't know why this turned into apology corner but i just feel like i'm aware that you know probably the it's been a bit more of a struggle recently and jason you've been on holidays so you're relaxed you don't give a damn you're just happy to be back in your home country yeah so i don't really know i'm going with this guys but i just want to say life's hard and keep on keeping on well i mean we started by saying that this has been going for four years now i mean if you look at any four-year period in anyone's life like things if you look at the beginning of four years ago of just the three of us of what was going on maybe myself somewhat excluded from that i think i'm basically the same probably but like just a lot of things have changed and happened and and that's just life so i i think what you're trying to say is we appreciate everyone for hanging on through the the lows and the highs and the mids of the show and everything that comes along with it yeah yep the good news is we're rewriting the whole show in swift so look when we when we relaunch ground up oh my goodness you're gonna be it's gonna be incredible so fast so just just hang in there for that you'll you'll know it when you see it that's all i'm gonna say yeah absolutely like and subscribe you're doing a swift rewrite uh no no no no rewrite but i am working on a new content management system and and web publishing service platform something i i don't even know the words to use i've been working on it for a while i've i talked about it um earlier this year um said a lot of things about when it would be done And keep moving that goalpost out of necessity. But I'm having a lot of fun with that. I'm going slow. It's a slow methodical thing. I'm really trying to get it right. And I'm really excited about that. But that sounds neato. Can you tell us more? Yeah. Well, it actually is called neato. Well done. Awesome. And, yeah, that just comes from my inability to name things. But the name is sticking. It's growing on me. Yeah. I think the website as of today, so I'll probably change this. So this will be immediately invalid. But I think right now it says it's coming in Q4, back to the business world again, fourth quarter. So that officially gives me until the end of December to get something out there. And I don't know if I'm going to meet that goal. But that's okay. I'm not going to beat myself up over it. I know there's a lot of people. I get some emails. I think I probably owe some people. Some replies. Life's busy. Sorry about that. If you're listening and you sent me an email and I haven't. It is busy. Thank you. I'm going to run with that. Sorry. Andrew Canyon said it's okay that I didn't write you back. But, no, I do have people asking me, like, hey, what's the status? What's going on? When is this going to happen? And, again, I just really want to get it right. And I'm just a one-man thing. I'm just sitting over here just kind of doing the best I can with the time that I have and the energy that I have and all of the things that are going on in life. And, you know, I could rush it and then regret it. But I'm not going to do that. But I am really excited about it. I'm really excited. There's something about this that I haven't quite figured out how to do yet. So I'm a little hesitant to share this. But I'm going to share it anyway because I haven't actually told anyone yet. And this is an exclusive. Absolutely. But, unfortunately, it's the kind of tidbit of information that people are either going to love it or they're going to be repelled by it. Like, find it absolutely awful. So we'll see. I don't know. That's the description of the show in general. So you're good to go. But what I'm aiming to do, and I still haven't cracked it. I haven't cracked how I'm going to do it safely and securely yet. That's the challenge. But the goal is for this to be a system that is completely, what's the word? Is it extendable or extensible? Extensible. Is there even a difference between those? I don't know. I need to get a dictionary or a thesaurus or whatever tool I need. It's okay. You've got me. I've got Andrew. Exactly. But, yeah, you're going to be able to do. More with this than you might think at first by virtue of the fact that it will lean into and embrace the use of PHP. So what I'm hoping to be able to do is make it so that there's going to be like a stock Neato experience. It's going to be fairly simple, fairly straightforward, bare bones. You know, make pages, publish serialized content. You know, just get good web stuff out the door. That's kind of the stock base experience. But the ability within any given page or even more holistically at the site level to define additional capabilities, to perform additional functions and add additional features in sort of an ad hoc way with PHP. That everyone will be able to sort of. Control on their own and do their own thing with. That's that's something I'm shooting for. I, again, have no idea how I'm going to pull it off, but I'm determined to pull it off. This is not like this is not like a static site generator that you download from GitHub and run on your own computer or run on your own server. This is a hosted service that that aims to allow people to effectively. Publish their own static content and to enhance the capabilities of that process with arbitrary PHP as folks see fit. So I don't know. It's it's a lot to bite off. It's even more to chew, but I'm really excited about it. I'm hoping I can make it work. I probably just turned off half the people that had any interest in this at all because they just inherently don't like PHP, which is understandable. There's plenty of things not to like about it. I happen to love it. But yeah, there it is. That's that's what I'm working on. Two questions. Question number one. For people like Martin, where PHP is actually older than he is. Can you explain why you decided to go with PHP? Is this a I'm comfortable with PHP? Therefore, I will use PHP. Or does it inherently have things that make this vision more possible over whatever is the most stupidly named PHP? Or is it just a plain JavaScript thing of the week? That's a great question. I think it's so the brutally honest answer is I'm running with PHP because PHP is my language. It's my language of choice. It's the first halfway modern and I guess the biggest of air quotes around the word modern you could imagine language that that I learned and that I still know today. My whole like personal programming journey is is really narrow. Like I learned basic in 1986 in the first grade computer lab did some Pascal in high school and then shortly after Pascal still in high school as a junior sophomore junior got into PHP and then it's just been PHP ever since for me and other languages. Languages have risen. Other things have dominated. Other things have been the flavor of the month, the flavor of the decade, whatever the case may be. A lot of really cool stuff out there. I watched Rails and the whole Ruby ecosystem explode. All of the JavaScript stuff has been exploding. That's always the current hotness right now. Of course, Python all along was like, yeah, do stuff with Python. And I just never had any interest in any of it. I learned PHP, I dug into PHP, sort of became one with PHP. And so, yeah, that's my thing. Having said that, though, so taking the ego out of it, I do think it's fair to say that it's still an extremely relevant language. By all statistics that are out there, 70-something percent of the web is still powered by PHP. I don't know, to be honest, if that's true or not, but that's something I was reading about the other day. It's some substantial percentage. The whole WordPress ecosystem is all PHP. The MediaWiki ecosystem is all PHP, or at least it was the last time I checked. Hopefully, that's still accurate. There's a ton of people out there still doing a lot of really cool stuff with PHP. And so, I do think that even though it's not cool, it's probably never really been a cool language. But yeah. And it's definitely not really cool today. I think it's still relevant. I think there's still plenty of people out there that are puttering around with it and doing things with it. And I still feel like it's really accessible. I still think it's something that people can learn pretty easily. Yeah, it's not perfect by any means. It's got a ton of little annoying faults, but every language does to some extent. So, yeah. It's really 50-50. It's half because it's the only language. It's the only language that I know enough to be able to work with. And I also happen to think it's a language that still has a lot to offer the world and that people hopefully can and will want to lean into and use with Neato. I just looked at – I'm not a coder. Tried, failed, never just gave up early. I just did the PHP Wikipedia look. And it originally stood for personal homepage. So, it's kind of – It's kind of perfect that you would be doing that. Yeah, it has its roots in – I mean, that was the first use of PHP was giving some of the early web nerds, myself included, a way to do more than just HTML. A way to add some dynamic behaviors and qualities to the web experience. I was happy with the blink tag, but some nerds wanted more. Fortunately, as of November 20, 23, it does. It does have deep cloning of read-only properties. So, I think you're going to be okay with using PHP. So, I think we're good there. My second question is a little more for the community here. There are probably millions, I would guess, of people that have committed their life, blood, sweat, and tears to weblog.lol. And I'm curious for those people. They're out there, I'm sure. They're probably listening. They're probably listening right now. There's just so many of them that are on the edge of their seat right now. What does that look like, do you think? Going from a weblog.lol setup that you launched, I think, three years ago, maybe? Something like that? To something like a Neato. Is that a separate thing? One sunsets and becomes the other? What is that? Without revealing too much of your roadmap, obviously. Roadmap? The roadmap is like a coffee-stained napkin. With ink running all over the place. I wish there was a roadmap. No, that's a really good question. So, weblog.lol right now sort of runs on its own little engine that I threw together. In terms of how Neato plays a role in that future, yeah. It's my intention to take Neato as a core publisher. It's my intention to take Neato as a core publishing system and put it at the root of omg.lol. So, Neato will be its own separate thing. So, for people who want to come along and roll out a blog, roll out a website, do fun stuff on the web, publish a lot of static content, publish a little bit of static content. It could be a link log or insert any name of any kind of format that people like to publish stuff. Neato will be there and ready to do that. And it will... I have a lot of thoughts. Probably shouldn't go into too much detail because this is all still really fuzzy. But I have a lot of thoughts around the idea of putting content out into different places. Making it really easy to start with, you know, slurp up all of your stuff in one place and then publish it out to something via FTP or something via, you know, the other interesting protocols. Or put it in a folder. Or push something into a... What's the Amazon data storage bucket thing? I can't even remember what it's called right now. S3. S3, yeah. Push stuff into an S3 bucket. So, there's a lot of things that I'm tinkering with around trying to get it. So, you could kind of take your stuff, your static stuff that's generated and stick it anywhere. But anyway, that aside, what I really want to do is overhaul. I want to do a little bit of a demo of what I'm doing. So, I'm going to go ahead and show you a little bit of a demo of what I'm doing.