Practicalmadness

A couple of quick announcements, at the end of which you will be rewarded with a photograph of an insanely large bunny rabbit.

• Friendly, my simple framework for fast, easy PHP web devlopment, is officially on the loose. I’ve been developing and using Friendly since last June, and the only thing more exciting for me than how it’s shaped up into quite a useful little tool in the last eight months is how much cooler it’s going to become in the next eight. If you program websites in PHP you owe it to yourself to give Friendly a look. (And you can start with this concise Getting Started guide I wrote.)

• Campfire, 37signals’ new web chat application (that I raved about earlier this week), is finally open to the public. And in case I failed to mention it earlier, no, Campfire is not free. You can get a limited 30-day trial (for which you don’t even have to enter a credit card number), and monthly subscriptions start at $12.

  Pricing is based on file storage and simultaneous users; for example, that $12 plan gives you 10 users and 100 MB for real-time file sharing (in my opinion, Campfire’s #1 coolest feature). I went ahead and signed up for the Plus membership, which gives you up to 20 users, 250 MB of storage and SSL security for $24/month.

  Congrats to the whole team over there for the launch, and for accomplishing the truly impossible: getting a beautifully-designed, cutting-edge web application to work seamlessly with Internet Explorer.

Finally, since you made it this far, here is your giant bunny:

My word that is a large bunny.