We've tweaked the RSS feed mechanism so that it's easier to follow what's going on via your RSS reader. This is probably most useful if you're subscribed to the DevX forums feeds, where there's a lot of activity, and you're particularly interested in viewing that activity through the lens of threading.

 Continuing to make life easier for our contributors and commenters... In addition to RSS feeds, you can now elect to receive email notifications when:

• a comment is posted on your content (for contributors)
• there is a follow-up comment in a thread you've commented in

 You can set your preferences via the "Email Notifications" section of My Account.

This blog post introduces a simple global static caching mechanism for PHP. But first, some background. One of the joys of developing this website, the Teradata Developer Exchange, has been building the site on Drupal, a PHP-based Content Management System. Having spent the last decade building heavyweight J2EE apps like Viewpoint, I was curious to see what life was like in the fast-and-loose world of PHP development.

Last week in response, to pestering from our users, we rolled out RSS feeds (see my previous blog post). We're glad to see they're being taken advantage of. However, some users have noted that it was a bit tricky finding the user-specific RSS feeds (no to mention inconsistent UI-wise), especially to find your own RSS feeds.

We're continuing to roll out features on DevX as quickly as possible, so please keep the suggestions coming. We've just made available a fairly comprehensive set of RSS feeds, including site-wide feeds and per-user feeds. To subscribe to a particular RSS feed, keep an eye out for the RSS feed icon - clicking on the icon should result in the browser launching your RSS reader (or you can copy the feed URL and add the feed directly in the RSS reader).

While writing my first article it occured to me that I was delving into a large subject area that wasn't really addressed by the four subjects currently available.

These are:

• Viewpoint (is that the software or opinions?)
• Database
• UDF
• General

Well, I guess it could have gone into general, but to me that sounds like "everything else that isn't worthy of having its own subject area". And that wasn't a very appealing category for my first article.