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A little more work, and a little more discussion with Daniel Khan finally has my tools for interacting with PEAR::DB_NestedSet complete. There’s a mistake in the documentation for the moveTree method that had me thrown for a while. Since it’s taken a while to get to grips with this module, I thought a summary of how I’ve used it might be in order. Please note that this is a fairly hastily put together piece, which does not delve into all the intricacies of the package but should give an experienced PHP coder with a basic understanding of the theory behind nested sets with the information they need to get up and running. For some backgrounf on nested sets I’d recommend this article. ...

Yesterday, the BBC brought news of another apparent flip-flop on the part of the Bush administration, this time in their Iran policy. While senior administration officials have until now been denigrating the EU’s talks with Tehran, the White House is now apparently considering “economic incentives” should Iran kowtow to their demands and give up any semblance of a nuclear programme. That change of tone is certainly one for the better. There are clear advantages to Iran in having nuclear technology, whether for energy generation or for weapons, and the argument thus far presented of “but we don’t want you to have them” doesn’t carry much water. But the administration really should have thought of this approach a little earlier. Playing good cop/bad cop single-handed just doesn’t work – your opponent is unlikely to be fooled, and has a good chance of poking fun at your expense. ...

I’ve been meaning to add some sort of comment support on UN Charter.org for a while now and the joint motivations of the site being mentioned in an ETech presentation this month and the emergence of a trackback module in PEAR has encouraged me to give it a try. The integration so far is very simple, but each article should now contain autodiscovery code and trackbacks that have been received will be listed. ...

As part of my new found involvement with the Talk Euro project (aiming to produce an online, commentable, annotatable version of the EU constitution) I’ve been considering how to use Moveable Type to keep track of different versions of a particular clause or article in a document. The issue is that the constitution (and the other documents we hope to then use the toolset with) will inevitably be amended over time and it would be good to be able to keep track of those amendments and to present comments on previous versions of an article to those reading the latest version. ...

By popular request, I just added a discussion board over at sarahmasen.com for those wanting to talk about issues arising from David Dark’s just published second book, The Gospel According To America: A Meditation On A God-Blessed, Christ-Haunted Idea. From what I’ve read so far, I’d have to say David’s onto another winner, and you can find out for yourself by reading a sample chapter courtesy of Books and Culture

Back when the Oscar nominees were announced I lamented the difficulty of tracking down the various short nominees. It seems the fine people at salon.com agreed, and yesterday they put five of them (3 animated shorts, 2 live action) on their site. There are some real gems amongst them, and when you consider that all five will take well under an hour to watch, it’s well worth a look. My personal favourites are " Ryan" (further proof that documentaries come in many guises) and " Little Terrorist" (the best political gestures don’t claim to be anything of the sort) but they’re all deserving of more attention. ...

Daniel Khan, one of the maintainers of PEAR::DB_NestedSet jumped in and offered help after my last post on the subject of that package. It turned out there was a bug in the file Menu.php within the current version of NestedSet which is now fixed in CVS. Once that change was made it turned out there were still a few bugs in my code to be worked out. With everything fixed I can now access menus as I would wish. ...

I’ve finally found time to make some changes to Services_Technorati. The key issue I’d been wanting to address was caching and following comments from Doug Clifton and Ryan King I finally got round to working on it. I’ve decided to make use of another PEAR package, Cache_Lite to handle the caching. That way I can hand off most of the responsibility for ensuring compatibility across different filesystems as well as allow for the flexibility to reflect searches with different options. The overheads are slightly higher, but the added flexibility certainly makes my life as maintainer easier. ...

The Six Apart Professional Network blog makes mention of a Moveable Type-powered project called Musicblog. Using blogging to break down barriers between artists and audience seems a good (if obvious) idea, so I quickly headed over to check it out. On the main site I saw: “Musicblog is a joint project between EMI Music and Pixelfury. We utilise the best social software applications to provide easy communication between music-lovers and artists.” But checking out the featured Musicblog, that of The Doves, was a disappointment. So far, it looks rather as if it were written by a publicist and consists largely of the sort of news artists have always carried on their websites. Hopefully it’ll move beyond window dressing, and develop more of an identity (like that of, say, The Decemberists) but I can’t help but feel that once again the music industry just doesn’t get it. ...

The latest version of my (S)FTP client of choice, Transmit, has just been announced. I particularly enjoyed spotting Sufjan Stevens’ tracks in this screenshot. Sufjan will be one of the featured artists at this year’s Festival of Faith and Music at which I will also be speaking.