isnoop.net blog

Below is an email I got through Zend’s certified engineer website. The questions posed by the writer below are not uncommon, so I have posted his letter and my response for general consumption.

Hi,

I am an aspiring PHP programmer. I need some advice from the right people like you before taking a plunge into PHP. I know to know what the future holds for PHP in the web development sector. Why is there more demand for ASP.net or Java than PHP when PHP is the best option available for web development. I have heard that PHP professionals are some of the least paid people in the industry, is this true? why should I not go for ASP.NET or Java as compared to PHP? I know it all comes to one’s interest but knowing a stable path for career is also essential. Please help me and my many other colleagues who want to join the PHP community. Your kind help would be highly a appreciated. Please be frank to give your advice.

–Vibhor S.

Vibhor,

Thanks for your email. From my point of view, I am inclined to
believe that PHP is actually in higher demand than ASP or Java.
However, the latter two are likely to be more common for large
companies. I believe this is mostly the result of corporate decision
making and the antiquated belief that PHP is not enterprise class.
Companies like Facebook, Flickr, and Digg are rapidly dispelling that
myth.

The roots of the enterprise class myth also help to explain the
question of compensation. PHP started off as a hobbyist’s language.
From there, it became the de facto scripting language for low-cost web
hosts. As a result, a lot of personal and small business websites
sprung up with PHP as a back end. Lacking the project and budget size
of medium and large companies, most jobs available to PHP developers
were (and perhaps continue to be) for less pay. This is not to say
that there are not good paying PHP jobs available. I live in Seattle
and am one of a group of 6 PHP developers for a medium sized company.
I believe we are competitively compensated compared to the industry at
large.

The other part of the compensation problem might have to do with the
experience curve of PHP programmers. I have seen many developer
resumes and the large majority of people who claim to be PHP experts
are in fact novices or even beginners. PHP is a very simple language
to learn and become comfortable with, but that comfort is not the same
as knowing (and using) best practices, OOP, or even PHP5. Many PHP
developers haven’t had any experience working in a collaborative
environment and, frankly, may not be suitable for full-time work in a
group of developers.

On the question of why one should choose PHP over ASP.NET or Java, I
cannot answer. I chose PHP as my language of choice for personal and perhaps arbitrary reasons. I like that it is open source, works best on *NIX
systems, is in active development, offers a tool for just about any
job, and has a wide and varied user base. It also helps that the
language happens to have a sustainable number of companies offering
full-time work for PHP developers.

One might just as well choose Java, ASP.NET, Ruby, Python, Perl, C++,
or any other popular web language for their own set of reasons.
You’ll find ample work with any of these under your belt. Some might
have a brighter future than others, but you’ll still find COBOL
programmers out there making pretty good money despite the dwindling
need for their chosen skills.

I hope this helps. Good luck with your programming.

–Ian

Last year, I tested and passed the Zend PHP 4 certification. Once again, I have overcome great adversity and climbed the highest figurative mountains in order to qualify and quantify my bountiful PHP skills.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to announce my acceptance of Zend Certified Engineer: PHP 5.

Tune in this time next year for my PHP 6 hat trick.

I’m working to revive the Seattle PHP users’ group. If you’re interested in PHP and live in the Seattle area, come to our next users’ group meeting at the new Seattle Northgate library on September 12th.

Details can be found on the SEAPHP wiki:
http://seaphp.net/

Add it to your calendar:

If you have a web tool that takes any sort text input for a search, you might find value in intelligently offering alternate spellings.

This technique is best used with an indexed list of proper words where it may be common to misspell based on phonetics. It is not meant to be applied to serial numbers.

First, create a new column in your index table for your alternate spelling key. Then, create a small batch script that fetches every entry from your index and runs the PHP metaphone() function on it. Store the resultant value in the new column you created. Also, make sure you update the code that adds new data to the table to populate your new column.

Now that you have your alternate spelling column populated, simply query the database with a metaphone() of the search term when a search turns up no results. You now have very rudimentary “did you mean” functionality, but it doesn’t stop there.

PHP’s metaphone() is an okay means of getting words similar to one another. In short, it boils the word down to a very basic pronunciation form where “buyh” and “bowwow” are alike. As you can see, metaphone can be far too general. What we need to do next is pick only the most relevant results from the similar words query.

The next step in finding more specific data is to find the words most similar to the one the user originally provided. I use the PHP levenshtein() function which calculates the difference between two strings. Simply ranking the results of the metaphone query by their levenshtein difference will provide you with a reasonable means of emulating the spelling correction/suggestion code used by popular search engines and spell checkers. This final step whittles words similar to “buyh” down to a manageable few, several of which may indeed be what you really meant.

For a demonstration of this type of code in action, check out my Compact Online Dictionary which I built for testing such ideas. The entire application spans only 100 lines of code and includes user-based result relevance ranking.

After last month’s Google AdWords Policy Reminder, I’ve decided to make it perfectly clear that you are by no means authorized to click my ads. You should avoid them at all costs, even to your own peril.

In case this isn’t clear, I have repurposed my magnetic words script to serve as entertainment on a new site dedicated to reminding you that you should not click my ads. Check it out:

http://dontclickmyads.com

For those with concerns about limited bandwidth and images that others might frequently link to, you will benefit from my anti-leech script generator.

This easy to use page will quickly generate a mod_rewrite script that you store in an .htaccess file in the root of your website or the directory you wish to protect. I’ve added images.google.com to the allowed domains by default so you don’t block innocent searchers.

Nine months after closing down the Gmail Invite Spooler, the page remains one of the most popular landing pages on my site. Over the past several months, this page has averaged around 2,500 unique visitors a day. I’ll explain the arc of this wonderful service, but first I’d like to make one thing very clear:

Sorry, I do not have any Gmail invites. Please don’t ask me for Gmail invites. I am truly sorry that I cannot provide you with any. Please go to Google Mail for more information on how you may get your own account.

You may obtain an account without an invite these days. All you need is a cell phone.

Background
In 2004, Gmail was a very hot commodity. Since April 1st of that year, people were clamoring to get in on the exclusive beta of pre-IPO Google’s hottest new offering. In late summer, by the time I decided to write the spooler, Gmail invites were no longer selling for $100 or more on eBay, but there was a large amount of clutter on the internet with people asking for or offering invites.

The forums and blogs that I visited were littered with chatter about trading invites, but the givers and seekers didn’t seem to be coming together efficiently. It wasn’t uncommon to see multiple posts back to back asking for and offering invites.

My wife may not always like it, but when I see a problem, my mind immediately gets to work on a solution. This was one problem that I knew I could make a simple fix for in a matter of hours.

The First Incarnation
Throughout its lifetime, the basic workings of the page remained the same: People with gmail invites would send them to a specific email address. The spooler would then read those emails and store the invites in a database. Site visitors could come and claim available invites on a first-come, first-served basis. There was no backordering of invite requests. When demand exceeded supply, one had to wait until someone else donated some.

Originally the spooler was made solely for the use of the people on the forums I noticed suffered most from inefficient offers and requests. It was a very simple system that was only workable on a small scale, but I assumed it would only ever see a few hundred hits.

On the first day that I had the spooler open, I received 2,592 Gmail invites. The second day saw 4,574 more coming in. By the end of the second day, I had over 3,000 unclaimed invites.

It didn’t take long for word of the “magical free Gmail site” to leak out to the general internet. Within a few days, demand exceeded supply and I had to implement controls on the page to prevent people from refreshing constantly while waiting for a new invite to come in. I also got the first of many lessons in writing code with scaling in mind as I divorced the mailbox checking from page loading.

Ups and Downs
After a month of running the service, the average inbound invites per day dropped below 1,000 for the first time. It seemed that most of the people who had extra invites on hand had heard about the service and donated all they were willing; Google was not giving out new invites on a regular basis at that time. The inbound invites continued to decline through most of December 2004 until they hit a low around 50.

All this time, demand for invites remained strong. I recorded as many as 100,000 visitors and over a million hits per day. On December 20th, the drought was over as Google started to give Gmail users about five fresh invites each day. The average day saw around 2,500 new invites, but they were still being snapped up as soon as they came in. I implemented more restraints to prevent abuse and further streamlined my code in order to keep my server load at a reasonable level. During this time, my web statistics began to break down because Webalizer couldn’t process all of the data without choking.

Way, Way Up
On February 2nd, 2005, Google decided to open the flood gates. They began giving out around 100 new invites per day to Gmail users. My service experienced demand increases like I’d never seen before. For the first time, I was forced to benchmark my code and decide which methods to use based on how many milliseconds they took.

For only the second time, supply was greater than demand. Anyone wanting a Gmail invite could get one through my service without any delay. Unique visitors increased, but hits dropped way down since users had no need to refresh frequently to see if new invites had arrived.

Way, Way Down
Monday June 6th, 2005 was the day I received an email from Stephanie Hannon, Gmail’s Product Manager. Later that day, I had a conference call with Stephanie and her superior regarding my service. They felt that services like mine had become a threat to the quality of Gmail. Their reasons for making the service invite-only were many:

• Limit new subscribers
• Heighten demand and curiosity
• Limit accessibility of accounts to potential abusers

The last reason was the one that made them care about my site. Spammers and abusers have a higher threshold of entry without the spooler. Despite the fact that I think Google should do more on their part to prevent automated account creation and duplication, they do have more random people gaining access to invites through a service like mine.

In short, Google felt as if too many spammers and abusers were getting invites that they obtained from me and saw this as a threat.

Why I Pulled the Plug
I’ve received a few thousand emails asking for invites, complaining about how “unfair” this is, or asking for source code. In the early days after pulling the plug, I would respond to every request with an individually written response explaining the situation. This generated many replies suggesting I just re-open the system in defiance.

Aside from the fact that I really don’t wish to burn any bridges with Google (heck, maybe they’d forget all this and hire me if I ever applied), I have good technical reasons for not re-opening the spooler: My service relied on people with Gmail accounts constantly inviting the now blocked email address gmail@isnoop.net.

Google is no dummy. They know full well that they must track the email addresses that the invites are sent to. They can (and did) automatically invalidate every invite sent to my site. All 1,240,162 invites I had left over the day I shut the service down instantly became duds. To continue the service, I would have to change the method of catching new invites to one substantially more inconvenient for the donor.

In the end, insistence on keeping the spooler open would have certainly summoned the massive lawyering machine deep within the “don’t be evil” company and I don’t think reasonable person wants that fight.

Fast Forward to Today
The former Gmail Invite Spooler page is now a brief testament to what was once the most popular Gmail invite spooler on the internet.

The bulk of the current 2,500 visitors per day come from non-English speaking blog sites that haven’t yet gotten the message that the page is closed. While the rest of isnoop.net has a 66% US visitor rate, the spooler is only 17% US traffic; it holds the #1 slot by less than one percent.

Almost all of the dozens of emails and stray blog posts requesting invites ask the same thing (in broken English). I saw the need for folks who didn’t speak my native language to get the full story, so I wrote a simple script to help them out. This has helped reduce the confused request flow, but it has also crimped the last of my dwindling AdSense revenue. Oh well. I ran this site before it ever brought me a penny and I’ll continue to do so for as long as I have the energy.

I turn down all requests for the source code for the spooler. If Google doesn’t want me starting fires in their back yard, I’m certainly not going to give away my matches to all of the other neighborhood kids.

I have considered revamping the spooler for use with other invite-only services, but I’ve yet to see one of great enough popularity and of proper nature to justify the effort. I refuse to open up such a thing for a community-based website on the principal that it breaks the “six-degreesâ€? network they’re trying to build up by bringing in random people with no association to the inviter.

Media Coverage
Aside from a number of blogs and forums that mentioned the service, these are the print media references I am aware of:

Book: Google Search & Rescue for Dummies – 2005
Text

Book: Google Hacks – 2005
Text

Popular Science Magazine – June 2005
Close-up
Full page

The Mercury News (San Jose) – May 23, 2005
Online version

PC World – April 13, 2005
Online version

Sydney Morning Herald – April 9, 2005
Close-up
Full page
Online version

Are you seriously still reading this?
This post covers almost all of the points I regularly discuss with folks who have questions about the service. I hope this overly long post has satisfied your curiosity.

If you are an adsense user, you may have seen this email:

Google AdSense Policy Enforcement
Hello,

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as http://isnoop.net/gmail/

Publishers are not permitted to encourage users to click on Google ads or bring excessive attention to ad units. For example, your site cannot contain phrases such as “click the ads,� “support our sponsors,� “visit these recommended links,� or other similar language that could apply to the Google ads on your site. Publishers may not use arrows or other symbols to direct attention to the ads on their sites, and publishers may not label the Google ads with text other than “sponsored links� or “advertisements.�

Please make any necessary changes to your web pages in the next 72 hours. (truncated…)

It’s nice of them not to bring the hammer down on me for having text that said “Please patronize our fine sponsors,” but it’s even more interesting to see where different ad companies draw the line.

The previous text was officially approved for use on my site when I was serving up AdBrite ads. In fact, AdBrite called me on the phone one morning to ask me to change it from the original text which read something like “Please support this service by visiting the sites below.” I assumed that sort of direct phrasing was frowned upon, but I wasn’t sure and ignorance is bliss.

I assume that Google would disapprove of me posting “Whatever you do, don’t click my ads!” above my AdSense, so that’s why I’m not going to do it. Instead I’ll just publish this blurb about making nice for the kind folks who might just pay me a few dollars towards the costs of running this dedicated server.

Whatever you do, don’t click my ads.

I’ve just published an update to my universal package tracking tool that now enables you to view a map of your package’s progress as it travels across the country.

This new mapping addition builds on the original features of being able to track UPS, FedEx, USPS, and Airborne/DHL packages all in one place and having that tracking information published into a personalized RSS feed. The system automatically detects which company your tracking number belongs to and loads the package data for you.

A nice side benefit of this new addition is that I’m developing a pretty robust Google mapping class, helping my other map projects to evolve.

In order to help a convention get off the ground, I built a tool that scraped all of the prices for round trip flights from every American and Canadian airport to eleven major North American cities.

According to my Costimator, Washington DC is the cheapest major destination, and NYC’s LaGuardia airport is the cheapest origin airport in North America.

You can enter airport codes and view the average cost to major destinations along with the percent difference from the average cost.