http://carltondickson.co.uk Just another WordPress weblog Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:05:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en After recently passing my Zend Certification Exam I felt that it was time to set myself another challenge.  This one is sure to hurt me a lot more but I know it's definitely achievable with a little hard work in the evenings! So after seeing the hundred push ups website ... http://carltondickson.co.uk/2008/07/09/challenge-number-2-100-push-ups/ Happy days, last month I passed my Zend Certification exam on the first attempt, Carlton Dickson is finally in the Zend Yellow Pages for ZCEs. The things that I would recommend looking at if you're planning to take the exam are The PHP manual, this is a must, any serious PHP developer ... http://carltondickson.co.uk/2008/07/09/zend-certification-exam-experience/ After discovering a few Google I/O conference presentations on Youtube something that grabbed my attention were the Google App Engine presentations.  The Google App Engine allows developers to run their apps on Google's infrastructure and not have to worry about server-related issues such as maintaining fast response times, reliability and ... http://carltondickson.co.uk/2008/07/08/google-app-engine/ So I decided it was time for me to get my own shed, not the wooden sort used to get away from a nagging other half or fix the mower, but instead test out things that may come in useful in future projects or that look interesting. At the moment ... http://carltondickson.co.uk/2008/07/07/every-man-needs-ashed/ Just started a project for a friend of mine showcasing their design work and one piece of functionality that I'll need is a JS based lightbox in order to display the work in a nice way. My requirements for the lightbox were... Small file size for all included files As few HTTP requests ... http://carltondickson.co.uk/2008/05/11/your-search-for-a-lightbox-is-over/ After spending 5 mins setting up my Wordpress installation and then half the evening figuring out how to get syntax highlighting working (duh), I thought this post might come in handy for other newcomers to Wordpress. So the first post I found when searching Google was one entitled "How do I ... http://carltondickson.co.uk/2008/03/02/displaying-source-code-in-wordpress-post/