Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

I just added RSS to the Vlog Comment Generator and even exposed the API to the public. Now you can receive every comment generated via RSS or create mashups that incoporate the generated comments. I have no idea why you'd do such a thing, but my web 2.0 manual stated that these features are vital to the success of any website.

The new and completely rewritten File Thingie is online and if you've been using it you should grab a copy. File Thingie is a small file manager written in PHP. You upload it to your webserver and use it as a simple substitution for your FTP program. You can upload, rename, delete, move, edit files directly from your browser. You can also use it if you have a friend who needs to be able to upload files to one folder, but you don't want to give him your FTP login.

The new version of File Thingie has many changes:

• Support for uploading multiple files at once
• Support for multiple users (with individual directories)
• Control access to files based on black- or whitelists
• Duplicate (copy) files
• CSS customization made simpler. Now you can only change colours. You can still change the CSS manually if you wish (it is at the bottom of the file)
• Much, much, much improved user interface
• Leaner code, easier to hack. Setup section smaller

One of my main goals was also to strip a bunch of features from File Thingie which I felt was bloated.

• Multilingual support has been removed. It was a real pain to maintain. I'm unsure if it'll make it back in future releases. You should e-mail me if you have an opinion
• Sorting is now based on file name only
• View source and W3C validation is gone.
• Checking file types using MIME is gone. It never worked properly anyway
• Adding your own logo to File Thingie is gone
• Help page from within File Thingie no longer exists. There is a fuller online documentation instead

Did I kill your favourite feature? Or did you find a bug? This is a complete rewrite and there is bound to be some small bugs. E-mail me at andreas [at] solitude [dot] dk if you have complaint, comments, praises and so on.

I've been researching REST webservices lately. In my very limited experience with webservices I've been using XML-RPC using Simon Willision's libarry. If you're unsure about REST I found a short introduction to REST and PHP. REST does look very easy to get into, especially when Lucas Gonze makes code available to automate HTTP status codes and the like. I'm sure his code will come in handy as I get into developing small services using REST.

What I would like is a collection of PHP functions that'll make it easier for me to create a client. Doing GET requests is easy in PHP, but POST, PUT & DELETE has to be built manually (as far as I understand). I suppose I should write those functions myself, and share when I'm done. If anyone knows about such a library of functions I'd love to have a copy!