Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 4: Pragmatic Version Control

This is the fourth and final part in my series of posts covering command-line Subversion. In Part 3 I promised to return and talk a little bit about using version control sensibly and appropriately, so this is me finally getting around to it.

A lot of these points aren't specific to command-line Subversion, or even Subversion in general, but are based on a good few years of working with version control, and may just make your life a little bit easier all the same.

Making Phone Calls and Sending SMS with HTML

Okay, so you can't really make phone calls and send SMS messages using only HTML; that would be silly. However, if you are developing web sites and web applications for mobile handsets, you can take advantage of some features in XHTML Mobile Profile which make it easy for a user to call a number without typing that number in. You can also use the same mechanism to trigger - on the user's handset - an SMS or MMS dialog with the intended recipient's number and the message content prepopulated.

That this can all be done by creating a specially-formatted HTML link on a web page is one of the most convenient, if occasionally misunderstood features of XHTML-MP. This post will tell you everything you need to know in order to take advantage of this feature.

HTTP in PHP, Part 1: The Request

When I wrote about HTTP for php|architect magazine, one of the topics that I ended up having to skim over for wordcount reasons was that of how to work with HTTP from within PHP.

So here's a quick overview of how to make and manipulate HTTP requests using PHP. I'll hopefully follow this up in due course with a counterpart post dealing with HTTP responses.

The Year Ahead in PHP

It's that time of year when thoughts, and indeed blog posts, inevitably turn to pondering the twelve months that have gone before. For my part, I thought it might be nicer to have a look forward into 2010 and think about some of the challenges and developments I might expect to come up against in my PHP work over the course of the year.