Back in the heyday of Web 1.0 portals were the rage; these days it’s social bookmarking or link-sharing sites. It seems that every time I visit Mashable.com or Techcrunch.com, someone has released a new one. These days though, it takes more than rounded corners to make a site successful. Rick Ross knows that and even though there’s no shortage of rounded corners on dzone.com, there’s also a well thought out user experience there.

For those that don’t know dzone or Rick, dzone is a social bookmarking site targeted at developers of all languages. Rick Ross is the founder of dzone. Like most social bookmarking sites, on dzone you can post links to articles you like, vote on articles others have posted and leave comments. Unlike bigger sites of this nature, you don’t get the latest Apple rumor or < personal political agenda /> story. Everything is 100% developer centric.

I’ve been reading Rick’s Javalobby.org newsletter since he started it and I have great respect for him. After many years of seeing his picture appear monthly in my Inbox, I finally got to meet him “The Ajax Experience” last fall. We started up a conversation about how to get the PHP community involved in posting links on dzone that still continues today. Rick really, really wants the PHP community to get involved at dzone.com.

So help Rick and PHP out. Click through and visit dzone.

You can login using your OpenID (you do have an OpenID don’t you? All the cool kids have one. If not, head over to myopenid and get yours today) to vote. If you want to post, you’ll have to upgrade (for free) to a full account.