I do a lot of mentoring of PHP Developers, and as part of that, I spend quite a bit of time showing folks where to go to keep up with news and trends with PHP, the wider community, and the web ecosystem in general. Instead of repeating myself all the time, I thought it would be a sensible thing to maintain a list of my recommendations in one place, to make it easier for everyone to track.
This isn't a definitive list (pull requests on GitHub welcome!), but I hope that you find it a very useful one.
If you know of any resources that the general PHP developer community / ecosystem would probably be interested in, please send me a pull request.
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[Planet PHP] (http://www.planet-php.net) Feeds: [RSS] (http://www.planet-php.net/rss/)
This is your one-stop shop for keeping up with the blogs of individual developers working in PHP today. Anyone who is doing useful work for the wider PHP community will be on here. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that anyone who is blogging about PHP but isn't on Planet PHP ... I'd be questioning why not.
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[Planet MySQL] (http://www.planetmysql.org/) Feeds: [RSS] (http://www.planetmysql.org/rss20.xml)
The same is true of Planet MySQL.
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[Planet PHPUnit] (http://planet.phpunit.de) Feeds: [RSS] (http://planet.phpunit.de/atom.xml)
You are unit-testing your work, right? If so, chances are you're using Sebastian Bergmann's PHPUnit, the de facto standard tool for unit testing PHP code.
Major browser news tends to turn up on the general technology blogs, but you really should make the time and effort to go and read the original source material too. Right now, there are only three browsers that you need to pay attention to:
- Google Chrome
- Mozilla Firefox
- [Internet Explorer] (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/) Feeds: [RSS] (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/atom.xml)
- [A List Apart] (http://www.alistapart.com) Feeds: [RSS] (http://www.alistapart.com/rss.xml)
- [Think Vitamin] (http://thinkvitamin.com) Feeds: [RSS] (http://feeds.feedburner.com/vitaminmasterfeed)
- [UX Matters] (http://www.uxmatters.com/) Feeds: [RSS] (http://www.uxmatters.com/index.xml)
- [UX Movement] (http://uxmovement.com) Feeds: [RSS] (http://uxmovement.com/rss-feed/)
- [Programmable Web] (http://www.programmableweb.com) Feeds: [RSS] (http://feedproxy.google.com/ProgrammableWeb)
If you use Linux anywhere in your development, test or production environments, then you must must must go out right now and purchase a subscription to [Linux Weekly News] (http://lwn.net). It is the one place to keep up with what is going on in the Linux community, and is worth every single penny.
Once you've subscribed to Linux Weekly News, you might find the following sites to be sources of useful additional information:
- [Freshmeat] (http://freshmeat.net) Feeds: [RSS] (http://freshmeat.net/?format=atom)
- [High Scalability] (http://highscalability.com) Feeds: [RSS] (http://highscalability.com/rss.xml)
- [InfoQ] (http://infoq.com) Feeds: [RSS] (http://www.infoq.com/rss/rss.action?token=fz2XKmURyotcK9328S1OPeg3TKsydT5A)
If it is happening and it is important, then chances are it will appear on one or all of these main tech blogs:
- [Engadget] (http://engadget.com) Feeds: [RSS] (http://feeds.engadget.com/weblogsinc/engadget)
- [ReadWriteWeb] (http://www.readwriteweb.com) Feeds: [RSS] (http://www.readwriteweb.com/rss.xml)
- [Techcrunch] (http://techcrunch.com/) Feeds: [RSS] (http://techcrunch.com/rssfeeds/)
- [Techmeme] (http://techmeme.com/) Feeds: [RSS] (http://www.techmeme.com/feed.xml)
- [Hacker News] (http://news.ycombinator.com) Feeds: (http://news.ycombinator.com/rss)
The next set of blogs are useful because they sometimes pick up stories missed by the big four:
- [All Things Digital] (http://allthingsd.com) Feeds: [RSS] (http://allthingsd.com/feed/)
- [Digg's Technology Feed] (http://digg.com/news/technology/media/recent) Feeds: [RSS] (http://digg.com/news/technology/media/recent.rss)
- [The Register] (http://www.theregister.co.uk/) Feeds: [RSS] (http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/feeds.html)
- [Slashdot] (http://slashdot.org) Feeds: [RSS] (http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot)
These blogs are useful because they're aimed as much at people who use technology as those of us creating it:
- [Guardian Technology] (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology) Feeds: [RSS] (http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/technology/rss)
Today's tech giants set the trends, and open-source the technologies, that tomorrow's startups are keen to follow and use.
Facebook:
- [All Facebook] (http://www.allfacebook.com/) Feeds: [RSS] (http://feeds.feedburner.com/allfacebook)
- [Facebook Developers Network] (http://developers.facebook.com/blog/) [RSS] (http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&format=xml)
- [Inside Facebook] (http://www.insidefacebook.com) Feeds: [RSS] (http://feeds.feedburner.com/InsideFacebook)