Whiskey Knits Project Bag

"The Cat Who Went into the Closet (Cat Who...)" by Lilian Jackson Braun

• William Estep
• Club reading

This is another interesting tale about Qwilleran and his two cats. In this installment, they are renting a large mansion on the main street of town. The house’s owner is retired and now living in Florida. When the owner suddenly commits suicide, Qwilleran suspects foul play.

Qwilleran, the protagonist, is not your typical hero. He’s an older gentleman, a retired journalist, with a mind that never stops questioning and an imagination that often leads him into trouble. He’s grumpy in the mornings before his coffee, just like many of us, and he’s not always polite. His flaws make him all the more real and relatable, and that’s what makes him such an interesting character.

RSS Feed in Zend Framework

• William Estep
• Programming

Going to get a little geeky here. But I wanted to share a simple, and effective way to create a simple rss feed of content in the Zend Framework.

The new ClubReading site is separated into two parts, the blog, and the books. The books site is now using Disqus for the comments, and so far Disqus is working out great, but that’s a topic for another day. The blog is a wordpress blog. What I wanted to do was display a couple or three of the recently added books from the books site on the sidebar of the ClubReading Blog. My thought was to create a simple rss feed of the most recent books, and use the standard wordpress rss widget to display the feed content in the sidebar. But - how to create the rss feed? Turns out it was pretty simple thanks to a great article by Alex Netkachov called “Syndicate content with Zend Framework Zend_Feed classes”.

King Charles Brocade

• Knitting

This weeks Crazy Quilt swatch is the King Charles Brocade from Barbara Walker’s, A Treasury of Knitting Patterns Vol 1, page 31.

I knit this beautiful pattern in a nice dark blue from Berroco Vintage Chunky called Dungaree, color 6187.

Enjoy!