Adam Trachtenberg

Thoughts on PHP, eBay, and too many technical topics for my family’s liking.

Today is Sunday, May 11th, 2008

Feature Article #1

eBay Search Results Speculation

One of the great things about working at eBay is reading the various speculations on the Internets about what’s going on inside the company and seeing how closely it matches up to reality.

Adam Trachtenberg | February 1st, 2008 | Continued

Feature Article #2

Lion Taming at Half Moon Bay

A new year, a new marketing campaign for trachtenberg.com. Between Christmas and New Year’s, I went to Half Moon Bay. Over the weekend, thanks to iMovie and the Mrs.Ms., I ended up with this:

Adam Trachtenberg | January 14th, 2008 | Continued

About this Site

Welcome to Trachtenberg.com. I am still working on the nice description of what’s going on here, so here’s my bio in the meantime:
Adam Trachtenberg is the Senior Manager of Platform Evangelism at eBay, where he preaches the gospel of the eBay platform to developers and businessmen around the globe. Before eBay, Adam co-founded and served […]

Goodbye 2007. Hello 2008.

January 14th, 2008 • Adam Trachtenberg • 1 comment • Related • Filed Under

I somehow decided to take 2007 off from blogging. It wasn’t intentional at first. However, at some point during the year I realized I hadn’t been blogging for so many months, it was would look better if I just skipped the entire year.

More Google Maps in Search Results

January 3rd, 2007 • Adam Trachtenberg • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

As a follow up to my earlier post, I’ve been seeing an increasing number of inline maps within Google search results.

I don’t know if they expanded the number of pages that trigger this feature, if they’ve rolled the code to a larger set of servers, or both.

For example: “bcec” and “pizzetta 211“.

REST vs HTTP+POX vs SOAP

November 6th, 2006 • Adam Trachtenberg • 7 comments • Related • Filed Under

Sam and Leonard ponder the differences among them. Here’s the deal:

REST == HTTP GET
HTTP+POX == HTTP GET & POST
SOAP == HTTP POST, with interop issues

REST Web Services, the Book

November 6th, 2006 • Adam Trachtenberg • 5 comments • Related • Filed Under

Sam Ruby and Leonard Richardson are writing a book on REST Web services. Very exciting. I love reading Sam’s blog and watching him untangle standards.

Looking at the Table of Contents, I’m particularly interested in “Appendix A: HTTP status codes and when to use each one.” (Yes, I am serious.)

Imitation == Flattery

October 21st, 2006 • Adam Trachtenberg • 2 comments • Related • Filed Under

As most of you know, I work in the cut-throat world of web services. Us evangelists are always jockeying for the best developers, and we’ll take any advantage we can. No holds are (Jeff) barred. If you come up with a good edge, you better use it before someone tries to take it away.

For example, at this year’s ETech, I broke through with a killer presentation titled: “eBay Web Services: A Marketplace Platform for Fun and Profit.”

Knowing a good thing when he sees it, Patrick from Google tries to respond at this month’s ZendCon with: “Scrub (Ajax), Wash (SOAP) and REST: use Google Checkout and AdWords APIs with PHP for fun and profit.”

If it’s Saturday, I must be in DC

October 21st, 2006 • Adam Trachtenberg • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

My travel schedule this fall has been absolutely nuts.

In September, I was in Kansas City and Seattle; so far in October, I’ve been to Austin and Washington, DC, with a conference in San Francisco, thrown in for good measure in between.

On Monday, I leave DC for three days in Las Vegas, come back to speak at a show in San Jose, where we will be exhibiting, and then leave for a weekend in Orlando nine days later.

For reasons of sanity, I will not be going anywhere for Thanksgiving.

PHP SOAP vs. SDO

October 12th, 2006 • Adam Trachtenberg • 3 comments • Related • Filed Under

In my role as eBay Platform Evangelist, I spend a lot of time exploring different XML technologies.

SOAP is obviously the big one. I use the PHP 5 ext/soap extension, which is great, but there’s actually another PHP SOAP extension that might be even better. No, it’s not PEAR::SOAP or NuSOAP; it’s axis2.