Ben Werdmuller

Author: Ben Werdmuller

  • Serializing PHP objects into JSON with JsonSerializable

    JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a handy data interchange format that’s overtaken XML in a very short time for a lot of API use cases – and rightly so. It’s easy to use, bandwidth efficient, and widely supported across platforms and languages. PHP is still one of the most widely-used web scripting languages. It’s perhaps […]

  • Making billions of dollars from the federated social web

    Diaspora was pretty exciting. A Kickstarter campaign that promised it all: a platform created “for everyone to have full control over their data and to empower people in to become responsible, secure, and social Internet dwellers”. They raised over $200,000, which at the time was the largest Kickstarter funding round ever. Neat! Yesterday, Diaspora announced […]

  • Living sustainably in a digital society: is it even possible?

    I had an interesting conversation about sustainable lifestyles on Twitter this morning. I believe that climate change is a major threat to our planet, and that we’re in danger of reaching a tipping point beyond which there is no return. More generally, because my personal mission statement is to have a positive impact on the […]

  • Tent

    Tent appeared out of the blue today: a protocol and reference server implementation for individual-to-individual distributed social networking. Or to put it another way, Tent is a way to host your own social data – posting and reading from as many apps as you want. Here’s their announcement, and here’s the GitHub repository. The Tent […]