Talks submitted to IPC/WTC

I just submitted two talks for the +International PHP Conference.

Take your PHP app to the Cloud with Google AppEngine

Do you worry about not having the right amount of servers and configurations to handle your PHP app's success? Or do you worry about paying too much money for an over-architected solution? Google’s AppEngine only charges you for what’s used and can automatically scale up & down to meet your app’s demands. It’s a great way to deploy your PHP application into the cloud with managed scalability, performance and reliability. This session will guide you through a typical implementation as well as show you how to migrate your existing applications over.

I was thinking I can use the experience I gained from the Google Cloud Developer Challenge to build upon for this talk.

I also submitted a workshop idea for +Drupal. I figure I'm still recently engaged enough with Drupal to tap into an outsider's perspective and at the same time, have the years of experience to share.

Building Your Web Presence with Drupal

If you’ve been considering using Drupal for your website, but find the documentation and vastness of the platform overwhelming, this workshop will give you a guided introduction that will give you the confidence you’re looking for. We’ll start with an overview and then go through the steps of building a site or migrating an existing site. Then we’ll highlight contributed modules & themes that can take your site to the next level. We’ll also cover how to extend Drupal by writing your own custom modules to extend Drupal farther. Finally, we’ll talk about some typical server configurations to ensure your website can handle its traffic.

And for good measure, I also submitted a talk I've given before on +Google Analytics to +WebTech Conference:

Making Cents from Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free and powerful tool that should be utilized by every website. At first glance, you can easily retrieve common metrics, such as pageviews, visitors, etc, but if you don't dig deeper, you're missing out on some really powerful ways to monetize your website even further. This session will guide you through these deeper layers, helping you monetize your traffic.

What do you think? Sound like something you're interested in?

Well, that was fun

So I completed work on my Google Cloud Developer Challenge project and it's live and submitted for consideration. I even put together a quick video walkthrough. Now it's time to sit back, cross my fingers and hope for the best.

The last few days have been a mad scramble, as I was done earlier, but when it came to deploying the project on the real live AppEngine, I ran into a series of production issues. The big one I posted about on StackOverflow, but after not getting any help there, I stumbled across this brilliant AppEngine/CodeIgniter boilerplate on GitHub, so I restarted the project from that and copied my controllers, models and views over there. That worked, so then it was small polish things.

+Ian Barber wrote a great post about improving the credential flow, so that inspired me to come up with a logo, which I did with the Drawing app in Google Drive. I also took out the Drive scope since I wasn't yet using Drive, although I think I will at some point, so the users can pull in files from Drive as well as save their results there.

Then when it time to submit the app, I realized the domain had to be in the format gcdc2013-X.appspot.com. D'oh! Since you cannot rename the instance name, I then had to go and create a new application, configure it, setup billing, etc for the new (& proper) name.

So now we wait & see.