Here’s an FJM style breakdown of Carl McDade’s well thought out and persuasive article. Haha…no really it’s just flamebait crap. That was a joke. There are three more scattered through this post. See if you can find them.

A few years ago a friend of mine tried to convince me to learn ASP.NET because it was much better for my web development career than PHP.

I know this friend. Huge success. He made millions building a site where people could post pics of cats with witty captions. Now he spends his days drinking Mojitos and reading old Dilbert comics - all thanks to the power of .Net and the lifeforce of crazy cat lovers.

His feeling was that ASP.NET a.k.a “.NET professional” is a real profession that requires education and training while PHP only required a text editor. That PHP would never be taken seriously by serious companies.

I interviewed at a Microsoft Certified Serious Company once. Wasn’t actually a real interview. They just called me in to make fun of my PHP experience. Then they took my lunch money and threw my backpack in a tree. I told my mom I tripped and dropped it off a bridge. Needless to say I swore of Serious Companies going forward.

Regardless of how many Facebooks and Diggs show up on the web PHP will always only be given the same importance as HTML or JavaScript.

Hands down my favorite sentence of the article. Frankly I agree with him here. PHP should be given the same importance as HTML and JavaScript. Which is to say they should all be considered very important. Obviously he was going in the other direction and even if Facebook gets drunk and hooks up with Digg and they produce a mass of FaceDigg offspring you will never change his mind.

Popularity figures from the fortune 1000’s servers show that ASP.NET is the unchallenged leader of the corporate market share. Microsoft ASP.NET sites have grown by 7.9% since 2005, And ASP.NET/ASP still lead Application Server technologies.

Interesting stats. Here’s my counter: How many of those Fortune 1000 sites are really just content sites describing the company and what it does and how friggen rad the management team is? When in actuality the company has a ton of other servers running apps built with PHP, Rails, Python, Perl, Java…

“ASP.net: When you really just want to work on content management systems.™”

When I take a look at all the PHP job ads and compare them to ASP.NET job ads there is something that is missing from the ASP.NET announcements. This is “must be able to show previous work.” This same line or something similar is one that shows in web designer job ads, PHP, JavaScript, HTML and Flash.

Carl’s brain: “Shit, I forget to trash Flash earlier. I’ll just sneak it in now. Whew, that was close. Back to stoking those pissy little PHP developers.”

This demand is never or seldom seen in ads for ASP.NET web developers. To me this means that employers are taking ASP.NET more seriously than PHP.

Or it means they’re sick of looking at CMSs.

Unit testing, design patterns and other tools of software development cannot remove the mental label that has been placed on PHP by businesses. PHP to them is nothing more than a glorified front-end template language.

People once thought the Earth was flat. And that made it true. It wasn’t until people starting believing the Earth was round that it actually became round. I’m serious. Until we can get businesses to believe in unit testing, design patters and software development tools for PHP they just won’t exist. PHP developers will be stuck using WordPad as their IDE and testing their programs on lab mice.

One of the things that I have been running into of late is having spent the last three years doing only PHP. It was a mistake, one that I will not make again by doing Ruby on Rails or learning any other scripting language that does not require minimal knowledge of computer science disciplines.

Wait. I could have sworn Carl just wrote he was going to start using Ruby on Rails because PHP wasn’t popular enough with the Fortune 1000 companies. Clearly I’m mistaken. Let me check that again. Nope. Shit, I’m starting to think Carl might not be the most credible resource. Not 100% sure yet. Call it a gut feeling.

I also don’t recommend that anyone that is looking to start a long term career in web programming start with PHP. This is because you will be in competition for work with people that come looking for jobs with a background in Java, .NET and C language.

Now I’m completely confused. Why would Java and .NET developers be competing for PHP work? Haven’t we already proven that those language are 10X more widely used and 100x more Serious®? I guess they just want the challenge of coding in a language that only has 3 functions and no support for “if” statements (coming soon in PHP6).

When it comes to development tools Visual Studio stands out from the crowd. It has a reputation that is so well ingrained into IT that mentioning it in an interview or having it on your CV quells many doubts that employers have about your knowledge.

Once I was in an interview and they asked me what program I developed in. I answered “FrontPage” and managed to keep a straight face for about 5 full seconds. Ah, that was fun.

The same is not true of PHP. Zend Studio, Net Beans, and other IDE’s like Komodo are not well known outside of the geek sector of IT.

Are people really picking their application stack based on the IDE’s available? Really Carl? Really?

If you are good in ASP.NET and have used any of the commercial Microsoft publishing systems like Sharepoint then you will see recruiters eyes light up.

Recruiter’s eyes light up if you say once successfully installed AOL and responded to an “A/S?” post in a chat room. We’re not exactly talking about a hard group to win over.

The problem with PHP is that there is no commercial PHP content management product that is popular or visible to the general audience of corporate IT workers.

Apparently he’s never heard of a little product called WordPress…

While you can mention CMSs like Joomla, Wordpress or Drupal these are only known to a select group of techies and not considered to be comparable to anything on the commercial market on any level.

I will bet you the souls of one hundred hobbits (don’t worry I have enough to spare) that if we polled a random group of recruiters, businesspeople, moms, recent outer world arrivals, and black plague victims resurrected from the dead, that WordPress would be far more widely known then Sharepoint and Vignette (a perl product he also mentions.)

The above reasons are why I am dusting off my C++ books and will go through some refreshers. Then later on next month I will be dropping PHP and doing only ASP.NET. Richard if you are reading this you were right and I have learned my lesson.

Hey ASP.NET, don’t say we didn’t warn you about Carl. In two years when he hits you in the back with a steel chair and tears off his shirt to reveal a J3EE shirt don’t come crying to us.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Blogarate is a blog rating site and widget combination. The obvious comparable site would be digg.com, but there are subtle differences. Blogarate targets blog posts specifically, as opposed to digg which covers anything that appears on the internet. There are other differences which I’ll cover shortly.

Blogarate is the creation of Clarke Scott, a Former Microsoft Solution Architect MVP. Staying true to his roots Clarke created Blogarate using ASP.Net, SQL Server, and MS Ajax. Take that anti-MS crowd!

Clarke, why did you undertake this project?

To provide a distributed news aggregation platform. By collecting blog post details including rankings at the source Blogarate reflects in greater detail what is making news on the web and what blog readers really see is important. Oh and it’s fun too!

Unlike Digg, there is no way to submit a blog post to the site. Instead it is up to the blogger to include the widget in their posts, which allows the reader to submit the rating. In fact it is impossible to vote for a post on the Blogarate site (as far as I can tell). I actually like this since it drives traffic to the blog, which is how it should work since the blogs are the ones providing the content for these aggregation sites.

Another thing I like is the ability for non-registered users to rate a post and still have it count. This does increase the ease of gaming however. Check out my post on adGridWork from a month or so ago on Blogarate. It was rated three times at 5 starts each time…all by me. One I did with my Blogarate account. The other two were when I wasn’t logged in, but all three were from the same computer/IP address. This is something that is going to have to be looked at before the system can really grow.

From the Blogarate FAQ:

Q: How does the rating system work?
A: Posts are given a rating of 1 to 5 by your readers. The algorithm for the rating system is kept a secret. We have kept this a secret so that the our system is as fair to all bloggers as possible.

My post that I rated 3 times at 5 stars each ended with a score of 15. The “secret” system seems pretty straight forward at this point. In addition to correcting the gaming issue, I would also suggest counting the anonymous votes for less then the registered voters. I think this is a good way to still allow anyone to vote, but controlling the impact of their vote. I would also suggest NOT keeping the system secret. Publish your algorithm and allow for open critique. Users are happier when they know how a system works and you’ll get less of the tinfoil hat types who think their is a conspiracy to promote certain blogs and keep others down.

My other complaint is with the widget. It was simple to install, but I wish I had more control over the look and where it appears on my blog. Some people will want to just put in the code and have it work, but plenty of others have super slick looking blogs and they’ll want to make sure the widget fits in with the theme. I was able to do some minor customization using css:

#PostRatingWidget {
     margin: 15px auto;
     background: #DDD;
     color: #fff;
     border: 1px solid #000;
}

But it just isn’t enough. What if I don’t want it sitting alone at the bottom of my post and I’d rather have it floated near the top of the content? Or put it in the header of the post? Maybe this is just a matter of putting together some advanced instructions, but I didn’t see that anywhere on the site.

I feel like I’m being super critical here, but a site that bills itself as “Blog rating widget” should do two things very well - rate and widget. There are big flaws in both of these right now. The flaws are correctable, but before I would even think about growing the user base or adding more features I would want to smooth them out.

I don’t want to give the impression the site is doomed. I like the concept - that the blogs themselves should be driving the ratings, rather than the aggregation sites. I meant my comments above to be constructive and I would definitely like to revisit Blogarate once it’s matured.

Popularity: 21% [?]