Foul was created in 2004 and development on it has been pretty slow. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – it works and it works well. It’s a lightweight script that serves a very niche purpose.

That said, I was searching for some documentation on one of Foul’s features and came across a page titled “Foul 2.0 Documentation” that gave a 404 error. I was able to view a cached version of the page on Google. Foul 2.0 has never even been announced, much less released. The documentation was originally indexed by Google in July, 2008 so it’s fairly new. It must have been taken down shortly after due to being accidentally indexed.

The new version is integrated with Prototype, an extremely popular JavaScript framework. With many new tests and features, and Prototype integration, I’m looking forward to the release of Foul 2.0. We use Prototype on several websites, many that also need form validation, so it would be nice if they shared the prototype code and reduced the overall JS footprint.

See the screenshot to the right (click for a full-size image) or check out the link. I also archived a version of the page, for historical purposes. I’ve put a nofollow on the link so it won’t get counted as dupe content.

I’m back from Austin and while I definitely have enough catchup work to keep me busy, I thought I’d post a quick review since it was my first time at the conference.

First, I finally got to meet a lot of people in person that I’ve known for years… Patrick O’Keefe, Chrispian Burks, Jeremy Wright, Aaron Brazell, Stephan Segraves and more. It was great hanging out with you guys.

This was my first trip to Austin and my first SXSW conference. I had a great time, and wish I could have stayed for the whole week, but we stayed only for the Interactive portion. I learned one thing almost immediately — SXSW has two worlds — the panels and conference during the day and the parties and networking events at night. I’ll give a brief review of each.

The SXSW Conference and Expo

All of the panels and discussions were between 30 minutes and 1 hour long. It seemed like in many of the discussions we were really just getting started and it was over. In a way, this is good because it gets you thinking about a subject and asking yourself questions, and leaves you to finish on your own. Hopefully you go back with some unanswered questions and continue the discussion online and with colleagues back home.

The layout of the convention center made it difficult to get from one room to another. Several times we just could not physically make it to another panel in time because it required walking clear across the convention center (which was big).

The trade show itself was a bit smaller than I expected. Since it is an Interactive, Film and Music conference I expected to see a fairly large trade show, maybe divided into sections for each. The exhibitors had fairly small booths and were giving out schwag like t-shirts, pins, stickers, etc. I saw companies like O’Reilly, Opera, Mapquest, Google, and Yahoo. A few people I expected to see but didn’t: Mozilla/Firefox, Microsoft, Apple.

Overall it was very organized and the panels discussed interesting topics related to our industry. I learned a good bit and enjoyed bumping into interesting people on the show floor.

The Parties and Networking Events

I was fortunate to know a good number of people going to Austin for SXSW, many whom I have never met in person. Several of us got together Friday night to meet and have dinner, and had some discussions on industry topics and generally just hang out.

Every night after that it seems there was a party or networking event planned that seemed interesting. There were a few blog-specific events that I enjoyed in particular, including the Chitika/ProBlogger Beer Bus and the b5media Blog Network Camp. I learned a lot about blogging and met some great people.

I realized quickly that the sessions and panels are great but they just spark your creativity and get your wheels turning. It’s the Austin night life that really makes SXSW what it is. I had a great time at SXSW and can’t wait for next year.

Practical PHP Programming

It’s a great reference book on PHP, covers PHP5 and is formatted well. It’s supported by a few Google Ads.