P’unk Avenue

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The Empty Air: An Interactive Sound Walk

    • The Empty Air
The Empty Air is an interactive sound walk of Rittenhouse Square. "What the heck is a sound walk?" It's easiest to describe this way: Hit Apple's app store and install the app on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Head…

PlanPhilly: connecting the people with their city

    • PlanPhilly homepage
Engagement with Philadelphia is one of P'unk Avenue's core values. So when we got the nod to redesign and rebuild planphilly.com, we were excited. PlanPhilly "engages and educates citizens on the value of a well-designed city and encourages active…

Node and P'unk Avenue: Tools That Reflect The Artist

    • Node Screenshot
Node.js is a hot topic in many shops today. The combination of sweet performance with JavaScript, a programming language everyone already knows, is compelling. That's why, when companies talk about the technologies they have chosen, they most often compare…

The P'unk Avenue Loadout

    • The Loadout
We've had a great process for setting up new developer Macs for a long time, but we've been slow to share it. Today we corrected that oversight by releasing The P'unk Avenue Loadout, an open source setup process and…

Great Philly Schools: information matters

    • gps compare
Today we were proud to launch Great Philly Schools, a project of the Philadelphia School Partnership. Great Philly Schools brings together information about all schools in Philadelphia: public, charter, parochial and private. The Philadelphia School Partnership achieved something that…

For the Ubuntu crowd: updating packages via cron... including cron itself

    • roosevelt
"We have nothing to fear but cron itself." - Franklin "DevOps" Roosevelt We heart Ubuntu Linux, and we prefer it on servers. When we order a VPS from servergrove or linode, we get a choice of Linux flavors, and always…

For the PHP crowd: adding custom functions to Doctrine 2 DQL

As most Symfony developers know, Doctrine 2 is the most frequently used ORM for Symfony 2, and perhaps the most popular ORM for PHP, period. (ORM stands for "Object Relational Mapper" - a layer that translates between PHP objects and…

Node.js: We're All Over It

    • mongoose screenshot
Everyone's talking about node.js, and for good reason. The opportunity to achieve drastically better performance and use just one programming language for both web servers and web browsers is not something anyone would want to miss. We have clients…

Faster PHP Without Tears

Two years ago I wrote an article about speeding up PHP by configuring your server properly with APC, FastCGI and so on. It still represents a solid set of practices for those who use Apostrophe, or any other PHP…

Apostrophe People Plugin!

    • people plugin directory
We're pleased to announce a nifty new(-ish) plugin for the Apostrophe open source developer community. The Apostrophe People Plugin lets you organize and display people on Apostrophe pages. You can filter, sort, and search for people and add people…

Apostrophe Scales: Part II

Were you longing to hear the words "and one more thing" at the end of Apple's iPhone 4S press conference? Of course you were (even though the 4S is pretty darn amazing, honestly). So here's "one more thing:" serious…

Wrap it up: storing files in the cloud with PHP

Every website has media. Images, MP3 files, even Office documents, cluttering your server's disk space to the point of no return. Amazon Simple Storage Service, aka S3 is a super-popular solution to that problem. Amazon knows all about storing…

Biking from City to Shore... lightning or no lightning!

    • tom under bridge
Last night I went for a little bike ride. Mother nature had other ideas. This was my view last night as my bike and I waited out a thunderstorm under the Columbia Railroad Bridge, along the Schuylkill River. Yeah,…

When service becomes a performance

    • mediatemple tweet
This is intriguing on a number of levels. This guy tweeted that he sure wanted a Morton's Steakhouse steak waiting for him at Newark International Airport. And lo and behold, there it was, etc. People pointed out that maybe…

Symfony 2 is here!

At long last, the first official stable release of Symfony 2 is out. It was worth the wait. Symfony 2 is an all-new web development framework for PHP. It follows great practices like dependency injection, namespaces, edge side includes…

MacOS X Longcat

    • macos longcat gag
Why yes, I am thinking about installing MacOS X Lion today. I'm kidding about the long download (at least I am so far, not yet having tried it). Downloads are a nice alternative to mucking about with DVDs and…

We're eating our own blog food!

P'unk Avenue's blog is now running on Apostrophe. While punkave.com has been an Apostrophe site for a long time, our blog remained a Wordpress site for longer than it should have. That mainly had to do with the need…

"You can do everything on the web:" fourth time's a charm?

The Google Chromebook is out. It's a laptop that boots in eight seconds and takes you straight to the web, where all your stuff lives anyway. It's a game-changing, Microsoft-killing, paradigm-shifting ball of excitement... or is it? As a web…


MySQL + NoSQL = joy + happiness

On Friday we released a shiny new Symfony plugin for those who need to store a little extra data without making a big ol' database schema change every single bingle time. Maybe you're tempted to jump ship to NoDB solutions…