We are living in XXI century, but PHPists can’t decide yet how to write: "text $b" or 'text ' . $b. I’m going slightly mad.

via Artjom Kurapov’s blog.

Today I found that Sphinx search engine has been updated. Major new features include:

• extended query mode with boolean, field limits, phrases, and proximity support (eg.: @title "hello world"~10 | @body example program);
• extended sorting mode (eg.: @weight DESC @id ASC);
• combined phrase+statistical ranking which takes words frequencies into account (currently in extended mode only);
• official Python API;
• contributed Perl and Ruby APIs.

I have updated Sphinx Client Library along with Sphinx 0.9.7-RC2 Windows build.

Almost all Web-applications needs data search logic and really often this logic should have full-text search capabilities. If you are using MySQL database, you can use its FULLTEXT search, but it’s not efficient when you have a large amout of data. In this case third party search engines used, and one of them (and I think, the most efficient) is Sphinx. In this article I’ll present my port of Sphinx client library for Ruby and show how to use it.

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Several days ago my best friend Alexey Kovyrin asked me to help him to create flashing effect on HTML page. I gave him advice to create this effect using moo.fx library. I wanted to show how to extend it, but I couldn’t keep from creating this effect myself.

moo.fx is a superlightweight, ultratiny, megasmall javascript effects library, written with prototype.js. It’s easily to extend it with custom effect and in this post I will show you how you can do this. In this article I’ll show how to create flashing effect: element’s background will smoothly change from one color to another and go back to first color (maybe several times).

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Zend Framework team works with gusto on the Zend Framework, great framework for building powerful web-applications in PHP. But too many peoples are confused with its seeming complexity. In this post I will try to explain architecture of most useful part (in my opinion) of Zend Framework - Zend_Controller.

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