Today it is Blog Action Day. One day to think about the environment. To think about what you can do for a better environment, even if it is a bit, since a better environment starts with yourself. The color green plays an important role in this, since almost everybody associates it with a better environment.

In the development of a web site green also plays a quite important role. Some people live for the green bar the W3C markup validator shows when a web page validates. The green color indicates everything is good, and that is also what a better environment is. Unfortunately nothing can be validated on how good they are for the environment, even web sites not.

Another green aspect of web development are Microformats. Microformats help people and computers interact with each other much easier, they are more balanced. Thinking about the environment also about getting a better balance between you and everything around you.

For the server-side programmers, I have this one: PEAR. Their web site is green, but that’s not the only equality between PEAR and a better environment. PEAR allows every developer to share and grab code others developed. Developers can learn and safe time by looking at code by others, or be nice for colleague developers by sharing their code. A greener world also is good for others, and people can learn from nature in many ways.

I almost forgot graphic designers. It’s a fact a higher percentage of the designers uses an Apple Mac. So it is good to know Apple was tackled down by Greenpeace to build greener Apples. It is a result of the Green My Apple website.

Concluding I can say web designers and developers can help the world to be much greener. If you have more ideas, I would love to hear: just drop a comment.

Lately I’ve been working on some group projects, and I had the idea to make a tool to report bugs, errors and other unwanted things on a web site. So I made that tool, and now it is time to share it with the world.

I made a page in my codex for the BugReporter. There you can find info for implementing the tool in you project (it’s quite easy), as well as a demo.

The tool is written in JavaScript, and the server-side script in PHP, but that can be changed in any other server-side language as you want. Nice features are making the bug-window transparent (double-click), and the AJAX transport of the data to the server. It is also very small, only a few kilobytes.

So, if you’re working on a group project, say more than three people, this might be useful.

The day before yesterday Acunetix warned us that 70 percent of all web sites has security leaks. SQL injection is favorite, so what to do about that?

Rick posted a nice PHP function to secure your incoming variables. Unfortunately it is an image, but that doesn’t oppress our happiness, does it?

Months ago I begun with a project: learn Mambo. The first horrible problem came in a few minuets: the code was bad. The second followed soon: all the output was hard-coded in the Mambo core components.

But finally: this (Dutch) result came around: Stichting Jazz In Groningen.

Recently the new version of PHP was released: version 5.2.0. It can be downloaded from the PHP.net site, as well as the changelist.

Some of the key features:

• New memory manager for the Zend Engine with improved performance and a more accurate memory usage tracking.
• Input filtering extension was added and enabled by default.
• JSON extension was added and enabled by default.
• ZIP extension for creating and editing zip files was introduced.
• Hooks for tracking file upload progress were introduced.
• Introduced E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR error mode.
• Introduced DateTime and DateTimeZone objects with methods to manipulate date/time information.
• Upgraded bundled SQLite, PCRE libraries.
• Upgraded OpenSSL, MySQL and PostgreSQL client libraries for Windows installations.
• Many performance improvements.
• Over 200 bug fixes.