In my previous posting I promised to join the $10,000 blog challenge by John Scott and explore non A-List weblogs that deserve my readers' attention. This posting marks the beginning of a journey along excellent weblogs you might not know yet because they aren't among the 'big ones'. In the next six months to come I'll try to make at least one 'Exploring the Blogosphere' posting a week. That means we're going to look at a lot of great sites!

The first site to get the honor is Stoyan Stefanov's phpied.com, a most excellent weblog about all things PHP, Javascript, AJAX and other web development related technologies.

Looks can be deceiving at times which is definitely the case with phpied.com. Stoyan uses a plain vanilla default theme that comes with every WordPress installation. If there's one thing I've learned it's the fact that one should never judge a weblog by it's looks. If you do, you might miss some most excellent content. This excellent content is exactly what makes phpied.com shine.

Stoyan publishes in-depth articles on PHP techniques and AJAX technology that many developers will find extremely useful. Let's look at some great posts on Stoyan's site:

• AJAX Banner Rotation

  A great entry on how to create auto-updating banners on your website.

• Image Fun

  A very elaborated and useful tutorial on image operations with PHP and the GD library

• CSS Coding Conventions

  An insightful article on how to write structural and maintainable CSS code

• Javascript includes - yet another way of RPC-ing

  An interesting article explaining how Javascript can be used to make HTTP requests without the need for an XMLHttpRequest object or iframes.

These are just some examples of the great content you'll find on Stoyan's site. If you're a web developer this site is definitely one to bookmark and/or to subscribe to in your RSS reader.

Stay tuned for the next part of 'Exploring the Blogosphere'!

Visit Stoyan Stefanov's phpied.com