Ben Werdmuller

Author: Ben Werdmuller

  • Elgg 1.8 has left the building

    Congratulations to Brett, Cash, Evan and the Elgg community on the release of Elgg 1.8.0. I know that a lot of hard work has gone into this release, and it’s the first major departure from the architecture that was set out in Elgg 1.0 almost exactly three years ago. One of the real benefits of […]

  • Spire Magazine: a teenage (mis)adventure

    I wrote a piece over on Google+ about Spire Magazine, my first real Internet project: I became the editor and publisher, roping in our friends with the promise that they could get free games if they reviewed them. We considered static text files or the web, but decided that neither had the possibilities for layout […]

  • Citizen lawmakers: is Iceland the future of politics?

    Note: it’s been pointed out in the comments (and elsewhere) that the source article is full of inaccuracies. Here’s the rebuttal. Nonetheless, I think there’s strong interest in a new kind of democracy that takes its inspiration from the hierarchy flattening we’ve seen on the web. It’s an issue I’m still keen to explore. My […]

  • Bonita: a PHP template manager with lofty ambitions

    I’m fed up of using the same PHP template pattern over and over in my web apps, so I decided to write it from scratch and iterate on some core ideas. And then open source it under an Apache 2.0 license. The result is Bonita: a simple PHP templating engine. It’s definitely version 0.1, but […]