Welcome

zombat.net is the home of Blake Soley, web developer and PHP programmer by trade.

I can no longer accept new clients. If you are interested in LAMP development or other kinds of PHP programming however, I do have colleagues I might be able to recommend to you. You can contact me at

(If you are interested in .NET development, see womps.net.)

Blog

I co-author a blog called PHP vs. .Net, a literary battleground where I advocate the virtues of PHP in contrast with my co-author's dedication to .NET.

My latest posts

• HTTP Signed Requests with PHP
• Installing Gearman and gearmand on Windows with Cygwin
• An Exercise in WordPress Integration, or Why WordPress Sucks
• Facebook Notifications – "An unknown error occurred (out of memory)"
• Fixing "Error 320 (net::ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE): Unknown error" with Google Chrome

Stack Overflow

I am a regular on stackoverflow.com, a popular programming forum created by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. I can frequently be found answering PHP questions there.

Recent Stack Overflow activity

• OO JQuery and classes
• Answer by zombat for MySQL slow group by/order by
• Answer by zombat for How do you remove a leading newline in output to browser in Codeigniter
• Answer by zombat for Passing api keys to rest api
• Answer by zombat for Populate the value of an input field with $_FILES['field']['name'];
• Answer by zombat for Reading cookies

Development

I am a software engineer at Backstage Technologies, a great company that makes fun social networking games.

Backstage's approach to social gaming has led to unique opportunties that allows the company to raise money for many different charities. It's just one of the reasons I chose to leave contracting in August of 2009 and join them full-time.

Interests

• I am an avid scuba-diver. I have a pro-level instruction rating, and sometimes even work the odd weekend as a divemaster.
• I enjoy photography, and can often be found fooling around with my Nikon D-70.
• As a beginner surfer, I enjoy faceplants and falling off my board on any decent-sized wave.