First off, WordCamp UK is taking place in Cardiff in less than a month’s time! I’m going and I’m rather excited about it – I was planning on going last year but didn’t quite get round to it. There are still a few tickets left I believe and they are well worth it. It’s a 2-day conference with Matt Mullenweg making an appearance too.

Secondly, the PHPNW’09 conference has just opened for ticket sales – it will be held on 10th October 2009 at the Manchester Conference Centre near Manchester Piccadilly station. There is also a Call for Papers and local members of the community are encouraged to give speaking a try. I really enjoyed last year’s conference!

Just thought I’d give a quick shout out! Will you be attending?

On Tuesday I got an email from Amazon telling me my order had been dispatched. Apparrently I could expect it either yesterday or today. However now I’ve just got an email from eXpansys saying the netbook won’t even be dispatched until tomorrow, quoting “overwhelming demand” for the problem. I’ve never known “Express Delivery” on a small item to take 6 days! Oh, and the only thing I’ll be getting back is a £5 voucher to use on eXpansys’ website. Oh great. I’ll save it for something I could do without for a few weeks.

Ideally I’d like my delivery charge refunded – this is scandalous and even though Amazon say it shipped yesterday and should be here today at the latest, it’s not even been dispatched.

Well I know who I won’t be buying from in future.

Foals

I love Foals a lot, their music is just really inspirational and unique that I love listening to it. It’s described as “math rock” by Wikipedia and the guitar in it is great. Take a listen on Spotify.

Modest Mouse

These guys have been round for a long while but still seem to be on the indie scene. I think some of their songs are really good but I have to agree with someone’s comment last week that their songs can be a tad bit depressing (:  Anyhow, I think they’re worth the listen, and they’ve released a ton of albums over the years so there’s tons to listen to! Spotify them.

Maxeen

Yeah, these guys broke up a few years ago, but their debut (and only) album, Hello Echo, has some really cool alt-rock songs on it. If you’re into alt-rock, I recommend you give it a listen! Here’s the link.

Ben Folds Five

I have to say that I think Ben Folds is an amazing piano player and singer, and some of his songs he performed with his group are good, namely One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces and I like Jackson Cannery a lot also. Give them a listen too.

Paramore

Hmm I’m on the fence with these. I quite like Misery Business but some of the other songs seem a little Avril Lavigne-ish and a bit too American (: Nevertheless, they’re worth a listen for a song or two!

ELO

I know this one just throws the post title completely out the window… but I really do like their music even if they were rather popular in their hayday. Evil Woman is probably my favourite, the beginning piano part is fantastic. Check it out.

Any other good artists do you think are worth a listen to? I’m quite interested in finding out some more artists, especially those who are quite ‘unknown’ but have an awful lot of potential. Drop a comment

EDIT: As zerojay pointed out on Twitter, I can’t exactly call much of this music mainstream. But it’s still cool music anyhow and I don’t know a ton of people who know these artists.

The game mode itself is simple: you’re stranded in a building and you need to stop the zombies from getting in. If they kill you, you can be revived. If you’re all killed, the game ends. However, you can earn points by killing zombies, which you must spend on new weapons, perks and rooms to keep yourself alive and see whether you can get to the next level. The game never ends, it becomes harder each level and soon you’ll find that the zombies quadruple in number and gradually become immune to your weapons.

I really don’t know why it’s so addictive, but it is. My highscore on the original map is to level 14, however I’m sure with a bit of effort I can beat that! Treyarch, the makers of the game (not to be confused with Infinity Ward, who make its predecessor Call of Duty 4 and the upcoming Modern Warfare 2), realised that the mode was taking the gaming world by storm, and so they made it available to everyone – previously you could only play it if you completed the game. They also added a new zombie map called Verrukt, an abandoned German asylum, as part of their best-selling Map Pack 1. Nazi Zombies must be now one of the most popular online co-op game modes of any Xbox 360 game.

Building on the success of the first map pack, the recently-released Map Pack 2 came with it a third zombie map – Shi No Numa. This is set in Japan, where Imperial Zombies try to attack the swamp (suitably translated as the ‘Swamp of Death’). Despite the change of Zombie nationality, the game mode still keeps its original name. The map comes with an awesome song sang by one of the game’s producers Elena Siegman with guitar by the audio team’s Kevin Sherwood.

Amazingly, some eagle-eyed fans of the game have discovered a series of easter eggs which they claim shows Treyarch is building a back-story to the whole Nazi Zombie game mode and they’ve found links to the Tunguska event, Area 51, ‘The Bell’ experiment and more. I find it amazing how well their ideas have come together and how they are all backed up in both Verrukt and the new map. I also find it superb that one of the audio producers on the Treyarch team, Brian Tuey, has supported the efforts of these fans all the way and even provided interviews with the two singers.

Doesn’t it make all the difference when there’s a lot better things to find in the game than just glitches? Despite not being a member of the team researching these easter eggs, I’m intrigued when I look around the  map (accompanied by zombies) and find all these references in person. I think Treyarch have done a great thing here by subtly hinting towards a mystery we are now frantically trying to piece together.

One thing I would like to see in the future would be a Nazi Zombies arcade game on Xbox LIVE. I think this would sell like hot cakes for Treyarch, and I do think that the inclusion of a similar mode in their next CoD game is crucial to it’s success, if their current release is anything to go by (but I’m quite willing to be surprised!). What is absolutely certain is that they’ve hit on a great idea which has gone down well with the gamers, and as the zombie genre is booming at the moment, it has an awful lot of potential. Great work Treyarch!

Jordan

I am hoping to post more often on here now – I get so many ideas for posts and by the time I get round to writing them, I think to myself that the idea has probably been and gone, and that I’ve probably missed the boat with it. Maybe that won’t happen so much in future.

I would like to write more about some of the music I’ve been listening to recently as I’m quite a big fan of indie artists and move through different groups quite quickly. I’m also willing to take some suggestions of new bands to try!

Well it’s 1:30am now and I’m falling asleep. Before I go, just want to send some link-love over to Francis’ new blog – A General Repository. He’s jumped aboard the WordPress bandwagon now and I’m looking forward to reading some of his upcoming posts! Check it out at http://ageneralrepository.wordpress.com/

Jordan

Yesterday I headed off with Beth and Josh down the Leeds & Liverpool Canal (and the River Douglas) and we took a load of pictures with our SLRs. I’m sticking all mine up on Flickr (I think Beth will be doing that too) and they’re already looking rather good. Looking forward to doing it again sometime (:

Check out the photos here!

However, the most anticipated DLC for the game has long been the Island. In fact, it was one of the first pieces of DLC to be announced, albeit the last to be released. On Friday they released a trailer which looks immense, and also gave us the release date of June 9th 11th!

Are there any games due for release soon which could be worth buying? (either console) Last game I bought was Saints Row 2 about a month and a half ago, but that is a fantastic game nevertheless.

Update: Got the release date wrong. It is actually June 11th (not the 9th). Apologies! (:

Other than the manual process of blocking accounts which post spam, what other measures can Twitter do to prevent it? It is obviously is a rather big problem.

I’ve known PHP for a good couple of years now (about 3 I think). I’ve built (and scrapped) many PHP scripts I have written along the way, and the code in it has been rather un-maintainable. Gradually, I’ve moved onto splitting my code logic from my html, using templates to change layouts and I even went as far as to create my own database abstraction class, well what I could put together anyway.

But the code is still confusing to look at when I come to modify something or add a feature somewhere, so I decided to take a look at frameworks. There are tons out there… Cake, CodeIgnighter, Symfony and Zend, and I’ve tried Cake to no avail in the past, so which one would be right for me?

On some good advice I’m going to give Zend Framework a try. After all, it’s kind of made by the people who made PHP itself, so I don’t think I can go far wrong. The other plus to it is that you can pick and choose between the components you want, and the components you don’t, and it seems pretty straightforward that you can implement your own components too. (I’ve yet to work out how to do this!)

I think I’ll see how it goes, I’m hoping I get the hang of it because using a framework will help me keep my code easy to maintain in the future, but I still want the level of control over my code as I do when coding my own stuff at the moment.

Custom Loops

Custom Loops is probably the most significant of these changes. By letting the user put all their testimonials in one category, you could hide them from the main post display, then run a custom loop somewhere else on the page to display just the testimonials.

An easy way of doing this would be to run the query_posts function choosing only posts from one category, or even pulling a single, random post. Then run a loop like normal, and the post would be displayed.

Custom Fields

Custom Fields are also something which, until recently, seem to have been underused. It’s easy to get a custom field for a post inside your loop, just use the get_post_meta function and you’re good to go.

These have been used for image resizers, video embedding code and even changing the URLs for people reading your RSS feed.

Theme Options Page

Theme Options pages are becoming popular in free themes as well as premium ones now. Aimed towards users who don’t want to dive into their theme’s code, they can help setup a theme and more. These are more complicated pieces of code, but it proves they can be done.

It’s Not A Post!

The whole idea of a post being a couple of paragraphs of text has become less specific, with a post now being considered more of an abstract concept for a piece of content – videos, mini-updates and a lot more. The success of WordPress in part can be attributed to its extremely flexible themes system as that is what has pushed the boundaries of the software and let it become flexible.

This is ultimately the thinking outside of the box which many themes are heading to, and it will be interesting to see what new ideas and techniques are going to be used in the future.