Kevin: The SitePoint Podcast episode 19, for Friday, June 10th, 2009:
“Copuwhatnow?”.

Kevin: Hi, there and welcome back to the SitePoint Podcast - news, opinion, and
fresh thinking for web developers and designers. I’m your host, Kevin Yank
coming to you from SitePoint headquarters in Melbourne, Australia and I’m joined
by my panel of co-hosts.

Brad: Brad Williams from WebDevStudios.

Patrick: Patrick O’Keefe from the iFroggy Network.

Stephan: And Stephan Segraves from Houston, Texas.

Kevin: In this episode of the SitePoint Podcast, Compuserve shuts down, PHP 5.3
is released and Firefox 3.5 on the same day. We talk about HTML 5 and video
formats and the shutdown of the XHTML 2 Working Group, all this and more in this
episode of the SitePoint Podcast.

But our first story today is the affiliate tax. For years there has been urban
legends going around that the government is going to try and tax email because
of money being lost by the postal service. I think we’ve gotten used to
dismissing these Internet taxes as myths but it seems like we may be in store
for a real Internet tax, right Patrick?

Patrick: Right. So what’s happening is that in a few states, the state
government is looking to utilize the affiliate programs that companies like
Amazon.com and Overstock.com offer to illustrate a physical presence in the
state. So right now how it works is if a company isn’t located in that state,
they don’t have to collect sales tax for that state but of course, these states
want to try to get a piece of the money that people that are buying things that
are located in their states. So they’re trying to use the affiliate
relationships to imply this physical relationship and then force companies like
Amazon and Overstock to collect sales tax.

Kevin: So let me get this straight. Right now if Amazon itself is based in a
state with a sales tax and it makes a sale to someone else also in that state,
they have to charge the state sales tax but that’s the only time, right?

Patrick: Yeah, that’s my understanding. I think Amazon is located in Washington
so if I buy something from North Carolina for example, I don’t pay sales tax to
Amazon. But if this legislation gets passed through, which apparently it’s very
close to being passed, then I would have to pay sales tax if Amazon maintain
their affiliate program with people in this state. They’re not going to. They’ve
already pulled out, closed the accounts, including mine, which was about nine
years old.

Kevin: So Amazon weren’t happy about this, they shut down the affiliate accounts
of everyone in one of these states.

Patrick: Right and it actually has already happened in New York but Amazon has
continued to work with affiliates in that state. However, with it being
considered in California, Hawaii, North Carolina, and Rhode Island, they’ve gone
ahead and pulled out of those states as has Overstock.com.

With that said though, governors in California, Governor Schwarzenegger and
Governor Lingle in Hawaii have boasted they plan to veto the bills, so Overstock
has already announced plans to go back into those states and Amazon is expected
to do so as well. Whereas in North Carolina, it looks more and more like we
might be seeing it as a reality.

Brad: You know I’m really surprised this hasn’t been implemented prior to now
government wide or in the entire US because it really has been kind of a
loophole that e-commerce sites and Internet retailers have always utilized to
bypass taxes. I’s great for consumers. I mean that’s one of benefits of shopping
online is typically you don’t have to pay sales tax.

Patrick: It’s also good for content creators who are trying to monetize their
content or people who run websites that aren’t an e-commerce business.
Obviously, advertising affiliate networks are the income for a lot of those
types of sites, so it’s beneficial there as well.

Kevin: Is there a risk of confusion for the customers that end up buying stuff
online here? Just getting a handle on what taxes I’m going to be liable for is
going to get really tricky. Let’s say Amazon, for the sake or argument, was
based in California, and I live in California, I will have to pay the California
sales tax, but if I live in North Carolina and I go through an affiliate that’s
in North Carolina, I pay the North Carolina sales tax… Is it based on where the
customer lives and where the affiliate lives and where the company is based? Is
it possible you end up having to pay more that one sales tax?

Patrick: No, it’s based on where the customer is located.

Let’s go back to the example, Amazon is in Washington, I think. If you’re in
North Carolina, you buy something from them, no tax. But, the point of this is
to take affiliates located in North Carolina and use them to illustrate a
physical relationship that Amazon has with the state and that would force Amazon
to collect sales tax from North Carolina patrons.

Now to be clear, they wouldn’t even have to use a North Carolina affiliate link
or anything like that. Just the simple existence of Amazon.com affiliate program
members being in the state of North Carolina would force Amazon to charge North
Carolina residents with North Carolina sales tax.

Kevin: Well that certainly simplifies things.

Patrick: Right and my problem with it is that again, I don’t know if this is
something that needs to be done at a state level even though it is a state tax
because to me, if I have 5 states that have this and 45 states that don’t, that
represents an imbalance and it’s not worthwhile at least I don’t think so – I
haven’t looked at their numbers that much – but Amazon to have to charge sales
tax on all purchases in the entire state versus keeping their affiliate business
in the state. I doubt those things are equal, even though their affiliate
business is lucrative so what happens is that companies or people like me who
are using the affiliate program will have to pay and the state of North Carolina
will get less income tax off of entrepreneurs like myself.

So there are two different taxes there because we do make money from Amazon and
that gets filed into income taxes as well.

Kevin: In the real world what ends up happening is you get businesses setting up
in particular states because they feel they have an advantage because of the tax
laws there.

I remember I traveled from Portland a couple of years ago and just traveled up
the coast into Washington, and I can’t remember which way it went but at some
point I crossed the line and the sales tax dropped away and everyone went “Yay!
There’s all the factory outlets that people come to because the taxes are gone.”

So we would maybe see the same thing happening online, shop at Amazon Rhode
Island because we have lower sales tax than Amazon North Carolina.

Stephan: I think Patrick, what you’re saying that the affiliates are getting
taxed, right; it makes sense then for you to go get an address in a state that
doesn’t have the affiliate tax, right? And say that you’re doing business from
there.

Patrick: If it’s both legal— I don’t know the legality of all that, but if you
could and it’s lucrative enough, like if the affiliate business was my bread and
butter and now it’s just disappeared… not necessarily disappeared because there
are companies that will still with North Carolina but Amazon is, of course,
probably the biggest affiliate program, if not one of the biggest for sure… if I
was making that much money then yeah, I would definitely look into that as a way
to continue that money coming in.

There is one thing that I’ve used that North Carolina people or people in
Hawaii, California, Rhode Island can check out is the service called SkimLinks.
Basically what they do is they take links on your site and they’ll pass them
through a redirect that basically checks to see if the site you’re looking to
has an affiliate program and if does, then they’ll link to the exact same page
that you would have linked to just you’ll get credit for it and it works through
the SkimLink’s service and they’re based in the UK. So presumably North Carolina
residents or residents of these other states could use them to generate
affiliate income because it does go through them in the UK and then they pay
you. So it sorts of create a middle man but the same amount of income.

Stephan: I’d say that’s even less legal than doing the other thing.

Kevin: The eventual outcome here, if this becomes a big enough issue and if more
and more people start doing business online, is the US and countries like it
going to be forced to adopt a flat sales tax across all its states? I’d love to
see the debates before that happened.

Stephan: I don’t think it will happen just because the states rely… you know,
there are certain states and there’s even within states, the cities rely on
sales tax, or property taxes in some places, to fund their governments. So I
don’t think we can see that a flat tax when some of these states, like
California for instance is broke and can’t fund to do business without charging
affiliates. It’s pretty bad. I just think they’re going to drive business away,
personally.

Kevin: Well this is a contentious issue but something that’s a little less
contentious that I thought we could talk about is Compuserve shutting down.

After 30 years, Boing Boing says, Compuserve is finally, totally, mostly dead.
Apparently, if you have a Compuserve email address, it will still work for now.
Compuserve these days owned by AOL but dating back to 1979, if you can believe
that, and still an active piece of the Internet until just recently but it is
now closed down. All of the forums, all of the personal sites, it’s all gone,
but I think it’s time, right? We’ve talked about online services that have gone
before their time recently but I don’t think this is one of them.

Are any of you guys going to miss Compuserve?

Brad: I don’t think I’ve used Compuserve… it’s probably been the mid 90s back
when they’re battling back and forth with AOL. Reading up on this when it was
announced it was interesting because Compuserve actually kept hourly rate
charges for Internet usage all the way up through ’97, which seemed really late
to me. I thought most of that was gone around ’94 or ’95 but apparently they
were still doing it.

It’s sad to see them go. It’s another service or site that we grew up with and
it was always there and now it’s gone. So another one bites the dust, I guess.

Patrick: They were the first service to offer electronic mail and technical
support the personal computer users, according their About page. That was in
’79. But they were actually founded in ’69 as a “computer time sharing service.”
That kind of takes you back, back to the time when computers were such beasts
that you time shared them.

Kevin: Well, the word is at the end of this story they say that the current
version of the Compuserve client software – like AOL you needed particular
software to log in to Compuserve, it wasn’t something you could browse with a
standard web browser – the current version of that software works on Windows NT
4.02 and was released in 1999. So if nothing else, I think operating systems
moving along killed Compuserve because I don’t know anyone who runs Windows NT
still.

Stephan: If you’re running Compuserve right now and you’re listening in this
podcast, please send us an email.

Kevin: Well, if you can.

Stephan: If you can.

Kevin: Something a little more up to date – last week saw two major releases,
PHP 5.3 is the first.

Brad you’re a big PHP guy because you’re all over the WordPress, right?

Brad: Yeah. Well the last few years anyways. Yeah, I love PHP. It’s great to see
the new version come out. I really haven’t messed with it other than just
reading up on the new features. I kind of stay a few versions back, whatever is
compatible with open source software that I am using but some of the new stuff
looks really cool

Kevin: Our top of the line servers at SitePoint are on 5.2.-something and I
don’t think we’ll be switching to 5.3.0. We wait for .1 or .2. But PHP 5.3, it’s
a big release. It’s the one we were gonna go to from PHP 5.2 to PHP 6 and get
absolutely all of the features they’ve always been talking about putting in PHP.
And what happened is that one by one, these features were lifted out and put
into PHP 5.3 instead with the biggest exception being Unicode support. So
Unicode, proper multi-language text support in PHP is still being held off to
PHP 6 if and when that happens but everything else, pretty much, that people
have been waiting for as new features in PHP are not in PHP 5.3 which is out.
We’ve got namespaces, so you can protect the class names in your PHP programs
from interfering with other PHP scripts running on your site, so just because
your script has a comment class and WordPress has a comment class, for the sake
of argument, they won’t clash with each other because you can hide yours inside
your namespace so that they don’t interfere with each other. Then we’ve got late
static bindings which is a really obscure feature of object-oriented programming
but essentially if one class inherits from another, it’s even more able to take
over the original class’s functions more smoothly.

Let’s see… jump labels, the goto statement is in there. I can’t remember the
last time I used a goto statement. That would be in BASIC on my Apple IIe I
think is the last time I wrote a goto statement.

I don’t know, for our listeners who don’t know what a goto statement is, in
short, traditionally speaking, goto is a statement that lets you jump from any
point in a program to any other point in the program ignoring whatever structure
you may have set up to organize your program, so functions, classes, whatever –
they go out the window when it comes to goto. It just lets you jump – foooo! –
over there to a completely different part of your program and as a result, it
has a bad name for creating spaghetti code.

But the PHP goto looks like it is limited to only jumping around within the
current function and you can’t jump into loops, you can only jump out of loops,
so it seems to be a break statement on steroids, mainly. So if you’re inside of
five nested loops and you want to jump out, you don’t have to say break all the
way out; you can just say “go to the end.” So it’ll help, I think, if it’s used
in the right places but goto has the potential to be messy. And everything else
looks pretty obscure, except the very last thing, which is they’ve added a
garbage collector which for big heavy scripts will help keep down the memory
usage a lot.

Stephan: What do you think about the anonymous functions that they announced?

Kevin: I think they’re great. That’s a feature of many computer programming
languages that I like. In short, if you only need a function once rather than
having to give it a name declare it at the top of your script and then use it,
and be stuck with that name, even though you only ever use it once, you can now
say I need a function that does this; I don’t need it to have a name, just give
me a function that does this and now use it, and then it gets thrown away.

JavaScript has had this forever and languages, like Lisp and Scheme, are –
anonymous functions, or lambda functions as they’re called in computer science,
that’s their bread and butter. They’re great in JavaScript. Languages like Java
have been wrestling with how to add anonymous functions or lambda functions for
years so it’s great to see them in PHP.

Released on the same day as PHP 5.3 is Firefox 3.5. We have at least one Firefox
user here don’t we?

Brad: *laugh*

Stephen: *laugh*

Kevin: Have you upgraded?

Patrick: I have not, I have to say I’m still on 3.0.11.

Kevin: Wow don’t you find it slow? Isn’t it like an ice age?

Patrick: I hope not. I don’t know. No I haven’t upgraded yet. I should do that I
suppose. It looks like it’s getting pretty good reviews but yeah. Usually, my
Firefox updates roll through by themselves so I don’t really usually mess around
with it too much.

Kevin: That’s the thing. This, as a major upgrade, is something you have to go
and download yourself; it’s not an auto update. I don’t know if they may
eventually push an auto update to Firefox 3.x users but for now at least you
have to go mozilla.com and download it.

I suppose the biggest change that’s going to be visible to users is meant to be
the performance. As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of the chrome, the buttons and
toolbars and things around the edges of the Firefox browser are powered by the
same JavaScript engine that runs JavaScript in pages, and this is the biggest
area of performance increase in Firefox 3.5 and so it affects every aspect of
the browser. So yeah, it should be a lot speedier, but things like being able to
drag tabs, like tear them off of the current window into a new window, those are
nice little convenience features.

Definitely, if you’re a Firefox user, get it. I think it’s a no-brainer as an
update. Brad, are you a Firefox user?

Brad: I am when it comes to certain add-ons. Primarily I use Chrome but when I
need to use Firebug or something like that, Firefox is definitely my
alternative. I have not upgraded as of yet though. The add-ons are incomparable
with Firefox, they’re great but just for a normal browsing, I like to use
something little smaller, like Chrome.

Kevin: Yeah, Safari is my walking around browser and Firefox has become my
development browser, which is nice for me, but if a lot of people make that
change, I don’t think it would be very good for Firefox.

Brad: Definitely not. When Chrome comes out with their own add-ons, it’s going
to be tough because as soon as I have add-ons or component – I forget what
Chrome’s calling them – like Firebug and things like that there will be no
reason for me to go back to Firefox.

Kevin: For developers, there’s a whole bunch of good stuff in Firefox 3.5.
There’s some HTML 5 support, so the new audio and video elements, support for
storing offline resources, and this is something that was introduced a few ago
in Google Gears but is now a native part of HTML 5 and therefore Firefox 3.5,
and drag and drop support built into HTML 5 is now supported in Firefox so
developers can mark certain elements in the page as drag-and-droppable and
there’s even support for dragging and dropping from one browser, window, or
page, or frame into another and having it do something sensible.

There’s a whole bunch of CSS support. We’ve got support for the @font-face rule
which brings TrueType and OpenType fonts downloadable into the Web and we’re
going to be seeing a lot more of that this summer with services like Typekit
beginning to offer downloadable fonts for use by web developers, CSS media
queries which lets you make your page styles behave differently on different
window sizes and things like that, and a whole bunch of little conveniences.

The official support for opacity, making things semitransparent.  Text shadow at
long last is something we’ve had in Safari for a while but yeah, being able to
put drop shadows on your text. As much as drop shadows are a little out of
fashion at the moment, used subtly, they can really add some depth to a design.

Everything else is pretty obscure, but sure, if you’re a developer, check out
the Firefox 3.5 for developers page that we’ll link to in the show notes. It’s
all in there.

I mentioned that Firefox 3.5 supports the HTML 5 video element, and that element
has been the source of some controversy in the past week, right Brad?

Brad: Yeah. It’s pretty interesting actually. Basically, there’s a split between
supporters for the video codec that should be included in the HTML 5 spec and
the two sides here are – and I may pronounce this wrong – Ogg Theora and H.264.
And those are basically two different video codec formats. I would almost
compare this to like an HD versus BluRay-type situation. The more that you have
kind of – nobody really knows what the standard is going to be, so you have
supporters on both sides kind of battling back and forth. And now the spec
editor for HTML 5, Ian Hickson, actually came out and basically admitted defeat
and said there’s really no way that we can at this point make a decision on
which codec is going to be the standard so they’re going to actually drop that
from the spec and not have a standard. I think I summed that up correctly.

Kevin: Yeah, so the benefit of Ogg Theora supposedly is that it’s completely
open source and patent free so anyone can take the Ogg Theora reference
implementation or build their own implementation to play Ogg Theora video and
they don’t have to pay anyone for the privilege. It’s a free format. Mozilla and
Opera believe that this is vital to the Web, that all web technologies as much
as possible should be unencumbered by patents, should be free to implement so
that if you want to build a web browser, there are no built-in costs or licenses
that you have to get and no one can prevent someone from building a web browser
by withholding those licences. Google kind of sees this argument and says
they’re willing to implement Ogg Theora but they are also going to implement
support for H.264 because supposedly it has higher quality video for a smaller
bit rate, so the amount of data you have to transmit for a high-quality video is
less than you get with Ogg Theora, but it’s going to implement both for the sake
of openness.

Apple is not budging. They are only going to implement support for H.264. They
don’t think that Ogg Theora is worth bothering with. Although Apple is
characteristically tight-lipped, the theory that people are going by is that the
reason Apple is sticking with H.264 is there is no hardware decoders for Ogg
Theora. So the little chips built into all the shiny MacBooks that let them
decode H.264 video without using much CPU power and even in things like the
iPhone that let you watch YouTube video without chewing up your phone’s battery
too quickly, the equivalents aren’t there for Ogg Theora, and so they don’t want
to risk tipping the balance of web video in the direction of a format that is
going to make their hardware suck.

And then there’s Microsoft who are not talking. They say they have… or they
haven’t announced any plans to support HTML 5 video. I guess they’re happy with
Windows Media Player embedded, and Flash Video seems to be the most popular
alternative to that.

But we’re going to end up with a situation very similar to what we saw with CSS
fonts. CSS 2 said that we can have embedded fonts in our web pages nearly 10
years ago now but the spec didn’t say what format of fonts browsers had to
support and so, you know, Netscape 4 did one format, Internet Explorer did
another format and the other browsers kind of sat back and waited for one to win
and rather than one winning, they both sort of competed each other into
nonexistence and we went a decade without being able to specify our own fonts in
our web pages. That is finally changing now with the browsers deciding to go
ahead of the spec and use something that is a de facto standard, TrueType or
OpenType. I wonder if we’re in for 10 years of to-ing and fro-ing about web
video.

Brad: Like you said, Google has basically implement both codecs, but they came
out and stated that they don’t feel like the Ogg Theora codec can handle the
volume on YouTube, so it sounds to me like Google is kind of making decisions on
their browser based on what’s going to work on a web site that they own YouTube,
which I mean I guess is understandable. I really honestly think if Google didn’t
own YouTube, I wonder if they would push and support Ogg Theora a little more
than they are.

Kevin: You have to applaud them though; they could pull an Apple and say because
it doesn’t work for us on YouTube, we’re not going to implement it at all. But
they seem to be doing the right thing.

Brad: It’s really only going to take one of these big players to flip one way or
the other and then that will be the answer exactly. Just like with DVDs; I
forget if was Warner or somebody, when they flipped to BluRay and that was it.
HDs were on eBay for half price the next day and the format war was over.

Kevin: Speaking of big players, rumor has it that the creators of the Pirate Bay
are working on a YouTube competitor that would use the HTML 5 video element and
Ogg Theora video. Maybe, that’s going to be the killer app that forces the
browsers to support Ogg Theora. Wouldn’t that be ironic?

Brad: If it’s all pirated video, I don’t know how long that’s going to stay.

Kevin: Well, I guess just like pornography defined the battle between VHS and
Betamax, we may find pirated video on the Internet ends up deciding the web
video war.

Stephan: Well, I think that’s interesting though, Kevin, because like you think
about MP3, Ogg Vorbis was the format that everybody was touting four, five, six
years ago and the turning point there was pirated music and Apple, right? When
Apple said we’re not going to support Ogg Vorbis in iTunes… I mean the only
thing you can play it in now I think is Winamp, which Patrick, I know you use.
So I don’t know – I think there’s a lot of parallels there, so it will be
interesting to see what happens.

Brad: I really hope the open source wins.

Kevin: This wasn’t the only news from the HTML spec world this week. We also had
XHTML 2 shutting down, with a whimper it seems. The XHTML 2 spec was the other
next version of HTML that the W3C was supposedly working on and when we had HTML
5 announced, they said they would continue working on XHTML 2 independently but
the XHTML 2 draft has not seen an update since 2006 if I remember that right
and, yeah, they’ve just announced that at the end of this year, work on that
would be shutting down and they’re going to focus exclusively on HTML 5.

We have a story about this on SitePoint and it’s really not that bad news I
think. For me all of the good parts of XHTML 2 have already been integrated into
HTML 5. The big things that we would have gotten with XHTML 2 – if it had ever
been supported, because that’s really the name of the game here. It doesn’t
matter whether a spec is written or finished or perfect or not. It’s whether it
gets any support and XHMTL 2 has never gotten any real support in browsers.

The idea was a) it requires that you use XML strict mark-up in all of your XHTML
2 web pages, so you know if you miss a closing tag, you’re going to get a fatal
error parsing page. What you get for that is the ability to extend the language.
So for the sake of argument, if say you’re building a music site and you need
musical notation, bars with notes in them, you could write an XML language for
describing those and then add those to your XHTML web page and any browser that
understanded that extension would be able to display those musical notes and it
wouldn’t require the XHTML 2 spec to be changed to allow for that.

HTML 5 is not an XML standard, it’s not a an XML language and so you can’t
arbitrarily bolt on extensions without updating the HTML 5 spec. But all of the
things that people who have come to like XML syntax have liked about XHTML over
the years, those are still available in HTML 5, people have taken to calling
this XHTML 5. HTML 5 using XML syntax and that is allowed in the HTML 5 spec.

So the people who for one reason or another want to express their web pages in
XML syntax can still do that with HTML 5. Everything else, things like the
section attributes and the heading tag with no specific level and so the browser
can keep track of your heading structure for you, all that stuff is in HTML 5,
and so I’m happy with this decision.

Brad: I think it’s going to be good long term. And like the article stated,
we’ll be able to devote more resources to HTML 5 which is good. It will be
strange not having to close out image tags and break returns and things like
that if you don’t want to. I got kind of used to doing that, and I know a lot of
the editors do that automatically now, but I think in the long term it’s going
to be good. HTML 5 definitely seems to be the direction everyone’s headed along
with all the browsers and like you said, it’s not about how good your standard
is, it’s about who’s using it.

Kevin: Definitely. So to close off this episode, I wanted to try something a
little new and host spotlight. I wanted to give each of our hosts an opportunity
to briefly point out something they discovered in the past week – a new website,
a forum thread on Sitepoint.com, a handy piece of software, or just a funny
video online.

So let’s go through our host spotlights for this episode and listeners, be sure
to let us know if you like this kind of feature and we’ll continue it in future
episodes.

Stephan, you’re up first.

Stephan: Yeah, I think this is pretty interesting, the DjangoCon is coming
September 8-12, 2009 and they’re calling for proposals right now. So if you’re a
Python or Django developer or have something to talk about Django, they’re
looking for you and you can go to djangocon.org and register there or submit a
talk there.

Kevin: I’ve never been to a Django conference but yeah, I’ve definitely been
getting into Python a lot lately, so it would be great to go but from down here
in Australia, that’s a long trip.

Brad?

Brad: I have a web site I want to share, Twittorati – we’ll put the link in the
show notes – and it’s actually— Just think Twitter and Technorati. It’s actually
owned and operated and developed by Technorati and is essentially going to be
where the blogosphere meets the twittersphere. They’re going to basically
showcase the top bloggers and also showcase what those bloggers are tweeting
about and then compare topics between the blogosphere and the twittersphere
based on the top bloggers and twitterers. Since Technorati is involved, I’m sure
there’s a little bit of money behind it, so it’s probably going to be a really
cool site. So check that out – twittorati.com.

Kevin: I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up quoting that site in later episodes.

Patrick, what have you got?

Patrick: Well, a couple of days after we recorded our last show, Michael Jackson
passed away of course, and obviously it’s been in the news. I don’t know about
you guys, but Michael Jackson was a big part my childhood and an incredible
performer, amazing music, and he’ll definitely be missed. But one thing that’s
come out of this is a couple of web mashups to pay tribute to him, and one of
those is called Eternal Moonwalk and that’s eternalmoonwalk.com. What the site
does is it basically mashes up just an endless stream of videos. I’m not sure
where they pull these from, maybe API – you can submit them on thie site.
Basically, it’s people doing the moonwalk, even video game characters. I saw
World of Warcraft one, I saw a screen shot from Michael Jackson’s videogame
Moonwalker. It’s just endless moonwalks to the beat of Billie Jean, which you’re
hearing now and it just struck me as a pretty cool mashup and they’ve done some
great things in the development of it. You can send a specific video to Twitter
and it pauses, and it’s just a really cool thing to check it out.
Eternalmoonwalk.com.

Kevin: It’s hilarious. It’s just this eternal scrolling line of videos of people
moonwalking and a running count of how many meters they have moonwalked.

Patrick: And if you submit a video, drop us a link.

Brad: I don’t think you can listen to this song without bopping your head a
little bit.

Kevin: Absolutely. And my host spotlight for this week, I’d like you to check
out the tools.mozilla.com site. This is the open web tools directory just
launched by Mozilla, the people behind the Firefox browser. It looks like outer
space when you first load it and it’s got floating in it icons for all sorts of
different web development tools and then you can search them or filter them by
categories. If you click the Docs filter, the only tool in the documentation
section is SitePoint’s very own CodeBurner plugin for Firebug that gives you
access to SitePoint Reference content right within the Firebug as you’re
debugging your web sites, but lots of icons in there. I can imagine this is
going to get a lot more crowded over time. It looks like they’ve just launched
it as a preview and they’re looking for people to submit their tools of all
shapes and sizes for doing web design and development.

So that brings us to the end of the episode. Short and sweet host spotlights
there. I think that worked out pretty well.

Let’s sign off guys.

Brad: I’m Brad Williams from webdevstudios.com and you find me on Twitter
@williamsba.

Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy network on Twitter as @ifroggy.

Stephan: And I’m Stephan Segraves in Houston, Texas. You can find me on Twitter
@ssegraves.

Kevin: Visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show and to
subscribe in iTunes to receive every show automatically. You can email us
feedback at podcast@sitepoint.com with your questions and comments.

Special this week on SitePoint, it’s the PHP and MySQL theme week to celebrate
the release of the 4th edition of my book, Build Your Own Database Driven
Website Using PHP & MySQL.

Patrick: Woo-hoo! *applause*

Kevin: We’re publishing a free chapter of that book every day this week so by
the time this podcast hits the air, all five of those chapters will be up for
you to peruse. There are the first four chapters of the book and a bonus section
from chapter 12 on handling file uploads. Check those out.

The SitePoint podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker, and I’m Kevin Yank. You
can find me on Twitter @sentience and follow SitePoint @sitepointdotcom. See you
next time. Buh-bye.