Following in the trail blazed by the likes of Cal Evans and Chris Cornutt, I decided to post a list of the posts on this blog that have received the most traffic this year along with some related commentary. However, in the spirit of Charles St. Michael, I decided to up the number of posts from 3 to 10. So, here we go:
Very interesting that this post was in the running at all. It’s over two years old, goes back 5 Ubuntu versions, and deals with PHP 5.3.0RC1 (current is 5.4.0RC4) and PHP-GTK when Cairo support was relatively new. (There’s now a separate PECL extension for it now.) If you want to learn more about this, you should definitely check out Elizabeth Smith and Michael Maclean.
It seems this isn’t as uncommon a problem as I would have thought. Sadly, in the 22 months that have passed since I authored the post, it seems the DOM extension hasn’t been updated further to support the DOM 3.0 standard or the renameNode() method mentioned in this post.
It’s nice to see this post get attention even if was just a brief hand-waving to point people to the article, which is one of two I wrote for php|architect Magazine this year. It’s also nice to see that despite being seen by some as a more menial facet of quality assurance, other people consider it important enough to read the article and take something away from it.
Another post that was just hand-waving to an article that dealt with a topic I saw as underrated. The article followed my php|tek 2010 session and preceded a Zend webinar this year on the same topic.
Between views and comments, it seems I wasn’t the only one who ran into this head-scratcher. However, if memory serves, I think there are plans to remove this feature from PHPUnit in future versions.
The post is about a year old now, and sadly I haven’t done anything of merit with Node.js since (though I hope to change that), but it seems the community is still as vibrant and growing as it ever was. Heck, you can even integrate PHP-FPM with Node via FCGI now. Node is definitely a technology to continue keeping your eye on if you don’t already use it.
It’s surprising that this post is still relevant since there have been four Ubuntu releases since the version that this post deals with. I’ve since moved over to Fedora 16, at least for now, and it seems to address most of my regular needs. I may look at other distributions like Mint later on.
Even though it’s over a year old now, I think this post gets the traffic it does because there’s not really one prescribed way to build models and because the existing documentation describes a number of components that can be used to build models, but doesn’t really offer specific guidance on how to approach it. Bit of a double-edged sword, I suppose.
I published this post on the same day that I gave my session on the topic at php|tek 2010. It’s one of more longer and content-richer posts and I’ve updated it on occasion as I’ve had cause to update the benchmarks that go along with it. Good to see that interest in SPL seems to be rising.
While I love that this post is driving as much traffic to my blog as it is, I do want to get around to contributing related documentation to the PHPUnit project. Hopefully that will happen soon. In the meantime, you can also read more about this topic in the Testing chapter of my most recent book.
So, one big take-away from this post has been that most of my high-traffic posts were written last year rather than this year. I can’t say it’s very surprising since, looking back, a number of my posts from this year were of the hand-waving variety. I’m hoping to publish more content-rich posts more frequently in 2012. I won’t call it a resolution, because I’d likely be jinxing myself in the process, but I will say that I’ll make my best attempt.
Best wishes to everyone in the new year.