This morning Google announced that they have moved the Google IO conference from May to June 2012. The blog post on the Google developer blog has all of the details on the new dates. Google I/O 2012 will now take place from June 27-29, 2012 in San Francisco.

No details yet on when registration will open for the event – last year the registration sold out in minutes so you better be quick this year.

I attended the event last year as a paid attendee and thought it was ok overall – way too crowded. Frankly it seemed like most people went for the stuff they handed out which included a Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet and a Samsung Chromebook.

I wonder how Google will deal with the people who already booked travel and have to pay fees to change their tickets/hotel bookings.

On November 17, Engine Yard will host a discussion around the future of PHP. Engine Yard describes the event, “If you are a PHP developer using PEAR and Pyrus, we invite you to join us this week as we explore the future of PEAR and Pyrus. We’ll be discussing issues such as where PEAR/Pyrus will be going in the next few years, what obstacles may be on the horizon, and how they’re going to get where they’re going.”

One of the panelists is Till Klampäckel who many of you know as one of the people who worked with HTMLCenter for many years. Till also just published a book (in German) about the database service CouchDB which you can purchase on Amazon.de.

The panel is free, will be streamed live and the panel will take questions via Twitter. If you are interested, you can register for the event here.

Google’s latest attempt at social networking, Google+, now has a new first-cut at a developer API. The Google+ Platform blog has info on the release of the new API.

Startup blogger Robert Scoble put together a list of some of the feedback on the new API – it seems the reaction is mixed. RSS creator Dave Winer says Google “doesn’t get it”. Why am I surprised that a company who has a VP, Bradley Horowitz, post on Twitter that he only cares about Twitter users with over 100,000 followers might not fully understand how to promote a new API to developers?

The Google Plus team notes that they are using the follow existing standards and best practices where they can:

• Our API methods are RESTful HTTP requests which return JSON responses.
• Our payload formats use standard syntax (e.g. PoCo for people info, ActivityStrea.ms for activities).
• We use OAuth 2 for secure trusted access to user data.

The Google Plus API is located here if you want to start to play with it.

The Plural Sight training group has launched a new course around jQuery.  The course is listed as a beginner class and apparently is available for free for the next 36 hours. I haven’t watched any sections of the course yet but plan to this evening. I wanted to get the link out to ya’all now in case you want to participate you will have the maximum free time to participate.

Here’s part of the topics that will be covered:

• jQuery Fundamentals: Introduction, Referencing a jQuery Script, Using Content Delivery Networks, Using the jQuery Ready Function, Getting to Know the jQuery Documentation
• Using jQuery Selectors: What are Selectors?, Selecting Nodes by Tag Name, Selecting Nodes by ID, Selecting Input Nodes
• Interacting with the DOM: Iterating Through Nodes, Modifying Properties and Attributes, Adding and Removing Nodes, Modifying Styles
• Handling Events: jQuery Event Model Benefits, Handling Events, Binding to Events, Handling Hover Events
• Working with Ajax Features: jQuery Ajax Functions, Loading HTML Content from the Server, Making GET Requests, Making POST Requests

Update – the free period is now over, if you want to watch the videos you will need to buy a subscription.

Back in late 2008, I wrote about my first experience using the CodeIgniter framework. Since then, I’ve enjoyed using the framework with PHP — it reminds me of my days programming in ColdFusion.

Today EllisLab and the CodeIgniter team have released the 2.0.0 version of CodeIgniter.

Here’s a list of the main changes from 1.7.3 to 2.0.0:

• Support for PHP 4 is gone, PHP 5.1 is now a requirement.
• CSRF Protection built into the form helper
• Drivers
• Application Packages
• Scaffolding, having been deprecated for a number of versions, has been removed.
• Removed the deprecated Validation Class.
• Plugins have been removed, in favor of Helpers.
• Added routing overrides to the main index.php file, enabling the normal routing to be overridden on a per “index” file basis.
• Added $route[‘404_override’] to allow 404 pages to be handled by controllers.
• 50+ bugs fixed

They also note that this new 2.0.0 version has moved CodeIgniter into a, “much more community-oriented framework than it has been in the past.”

I can’t wait to play with the new version and try out some of the new features and functions.

Last year Google released Page Speed — a suite of tools to make webpages load faster. There is a Page Speed extension for Firefox/Firebug which helps web developers see how their web pages and web applications are being loaded and the time it takes for each piece of the page to load.

Today they announced the release of mod_pagespeed, a module for Apache Web Servers. Google notes, “(the module)…perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) — in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.”

Google is working with GoDaddy to get mod_pagespeed installed on all of their webservers.

Here’s a simple video from Google to show you a basic webpage and the difference in loading time with and without using mod_pagespeed.
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DrupalCamp is coming back to NYC this summer. Registration opens on May 24 and the event will be held on Saturday, July 24th and Sunday, July 25th. DrupalCampNYC will be held at the NYU/Poly campus in Brooklyn – it’s just one subway stop from Manhattan.

If you would like to submit a session proposal, you can do so on May 24th. Here’s a list of the topics:

• Site Building with Drupal
• Design/User Interface/Theming
• Programming and Module Development
• Site Showcases
• Drupal for Business
• Drupal for Non-Profit

DrupalCampNYC costs $10 and includes admission for both days plus breakfast and lunch.

Moogo lets you create professional looking websites with a range of design and layout options for almost any type of content site. There are a wide range of options inside the Moogo portal and site creation is very quick and easy. It’s just three simple steps and if you can use Microsoft Word, you will be able to use Moogo.

The only thing you need to decide with Moogo is what features you want to use. Moogo offers you a Free Website with minimal options and features, something very basis if you are not ready for a full web presence. Then there are paid options ranging from $4.99/month to $14.99/month. I wont go into explaining the offerings for each of the paid plans, but I will explain the steps on how to setup the Personal Website plan:

Selecting a Layout

The first step is all about selecting the correct layout for your site. Moogo offers a variety of layouts from which you can select the one that best suits your needs. Assign the headers, the header is the top image on your page and you can select from a variety of categories, from Interests to Information Technology. You can preview your selections on the right side to see the picture of what the page looks like.

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During the SXSW conference in Austin this week, Google held an all day hackathon event. The idea behind the hackathon is to allow developers to create applications in one day and also get help from Google employees on applications they are developing.

I recorded the session that discussed Google App Engine and the video is below. You can also download all of the “code labs” which are simple tutorials on how to use a variety of Google APIs and services including Google App Engine.
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Amazon Web Services has announced the launch of versioning support for their S3 cloud storage product. By using the versioning function, it will help make sure you (or your users) never accidentally remove or update an object. The S3 versioning will allow you to rollback to a safe version if needed. You can also use the versioning option for storage and archiving as you can now just keep writing to the same file name and each new write will create a version.

Amazon notes, “Once you enable Versioning for a bucket, Amazon S3 preserves existing objects anytime you perform a PUT, POST, COPY, or DELETE operation on them. By default, GET requests will retrieve the most recently written version. Older versions of an overwritten or deleted object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request.”

The AWS S3 versioning is available for the standard data storage rates. So if you store 2 versions of an image, you will be charged for the storage of both objects. To use versioning, you MUST set the bucket to use it – otherwise it will be the same bucket as you’ve had previously.