If you’re a single PHP developer without your own team, setting up your own environment on a server could not only be costly and timely, but it’s probably something you don’t even like to do. Zend’s Developer Cloud wants you to be able to focus on your code by giving you free tools and an environment that deploys directly to most of the top cloud hosting services. Everything is controlled from a simple web interface.

The service is free, but is invite only right now, with invites trickling out slowly. Go here to request yours. The service comes from the company who makes the Zend Developer Studio.

Zend says this about its Developer Cloud service:

Zend Developer Cloud, as its name suggests, is a cloud-based environment designed to help you code more quickly and more efficiently. It includes a robust PHP stack, advanced debugging capabilities, collaboration tools and much more. Zend Developer Cloud is only a few clicks away and does not require any installation. To make it even better, it’s absolutely free!

The company has posted this video that illustrates how simple it is to get going with the service right away:

Zend was co-founded in 1999 by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, in hopes to push the PHP language into mainstream usage. The company points out that PHP runs more than one-third of the world’s websites. Zend has raised $44M to date, and is a serious player in cloud services.

Since you can push your code right to services like Amazon’s and Rackspace’s from Zend’s Developer Cloud with absolute simplicity, your apps can be up and running without having to waste time with a server environment at all. The hot buzz space in technology right now has to be the cloud, especially after Apple launched iCloud with iOS5. The idea of storing your data somewhere other than on your own computer is becoming understood by more people than ever.

About a month ago, I was running into a bit of a roadblock. I wanted to pull all of my photos from Flickr, and put them somewhere else. Not necessarily to share with other people, but to store and display them for myself, my closest friends, and family.

The best solution I’ve seen by far is YCombinator startup Snapjoy, a company founded by Michael Dwan and JP Ren, and which is currently in private beta.

The other issue that Snapjoy addresses is that I constantly fear that I’ll have a hard drive failure and lose my photos. I know that there are a lot of solutions such as Box.net or Dropbox for file backups, but I see photo hosting as a completely different beast. I want to view them wherever they are hosted. Easily. Snapjoy does an amazing job at automatically categorizing your photos into a timeline as well as giving you a few neat features to view random photos. The fact that the app is gorgeously designed certainly doesn’t hurt either.

Uploading your photos

Uploading photos to Snapjoy couldn’t be easier. You can upload them through the site itself, or use its Mac OS X app ‘Shoebox‘ to upload photos in bulk. The uploading process is quick, as Snapjoy hosts files on Amazon’s cloud service. Photo processing and categorization is also done on the fly, so once you return to the site, your photos are all in place.

Viewing your photos

This is where Snapjoy really shines. Each photo you upload has meta data attached to it. The photo provides Snapjoy with key information, such as the time and date it was taken. Rather than make you create sets of photos, Snapjoy automatically places these photos into a timeline, based on the time and date attached to the photo. It’s smart, and just works.

I have to think that Facebook took some cues from Snapjoy, because the timeline view to check out your past is so smart, it makes photo viewing effortless. Viewing my photos from 2007 on Flickr required me to either find a set that I had created, or click back in time. Much like Apple, Snapjoy just wants you to enjoy your media.

You do have the option to share photos with friends, but you must enter them one at a time using their email address. I don’t use the service for mass sharing, so that’s OK with me. However, the company assures me that it is adding easier sharing and privacy features, as it’s something that Snapjoy beta users have asked for.

Remember when: The killer feature

As I’ve mentioned, it’s often the little features that really make a service unique and enjoyable to use, and ‘Remember when’ is Snapjoys killer feature for me. Every time you load Snapjoy, a random photo in your timeline shows up and you can click to view it. Once you do, you’re given an option to click ‘Shuffle”, and you can then shuffle through as many photos as you like randomly. It’s like taking a random walk down memory lane. If you have a lot of photos like I do (14,888 currently), you could spend hours doing this.

The Snapjoy team was gracious enough to provide us with an exclusive set of 250 invites to the service for The Next Web readers. Go get your Snapjoy account now. The invites are first come, first serve. The service is free to use, but once it institutes a pay model, the company will charge for storage used over a certain limit. More than likely I’ll be one of those people, and that’s fine with me.

The service feels like an Apple product, and if you took the Snapjoy logo off of it, I would think that it’s an Apple cloud photo sharing service. Hopefully Apple pays attention to what’s going on here.

If you miss out on one of the invites, there’s a public demo of the site right here

Tumblr has experienced huge growth over the past year, but it has also been plagued with scaling issues. It’s increasing downtime frequency even led to the Tumblr team implementing its own version of Twitter’s Fail Whale; the Tumbeasts.

The premium WordPress theme company waited for the release of WordPress 3.1 to release its tool because the new self-hosted blogging software supports post formats, which were not present in prior releases.

The tool will create a WXR (WordPress eXtended RSS) file from your tumblr site which can be imported into WordPress.

Creating 8 tumblog themes for WordPress, WooThemes is hoping that existing Tumblr users will want to have more control over their content and its uptime, releasing a free WooTumblog plugin that replicates the Tumblr publishing interface on any WordPress installation.

If you’re on Tumblr and want to have more control over your blog and the features if can offer, have a look at WooThemes’ Tumblr2WP Exporter and see if a WordPress blog could be for you.

Lifeyo, a new startup company based out of NewPort Beach California and who recently launched at SXWX actually has a mission in life, to create “The People’s Website Builder”, and so far they are doing quite a job.

Lifeyo is mostly targeted towards casual internet users, and people just starting out on the web. They provide a simple way for anyone (even a 6 year old boy) to easily create a good looking and functional website.

They employ their own drag and drop UI which helps users easily create their own website without having to edit or write a single line of code. Veteran web developers can also appreciate Lifeyo because of their simple functionality, but also the fact that Lifeyo does allow you to import your own CSS and further customize your website. If you are not a coder, you may have to wait a while for customizable templates to be released, where you could pick your own color scheme and design.

Lifeyo is currently running on a freemium platform, but does plan to release a pro version in the near future. One of the current premium features that Lifeyo offers now is the option to use your own domain instead of a sub domain from Lifeyo. They have discussed the possibility of an SDK using their drag and drop functionality, but it’s still on the drawing board.

Whether you are a veteran web developer or just starting out on the web, Lifeyo is a great option for easily creating and maintaining your own website. If a 6 year old boy can blog using Lifeyo, then im pretty sure that everyone else can too.