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A little update on my project and 1 question

K

kgiessler

New Member
I've decided to use PHP...mainly because its open source (didnt really understand what that meant until recently). I like the idea of not having to steal...

I think PHP will be used to do basically two things on my site:
-The dynamic contact list I mentioned earlier in http://www.freewebspace.net/forums/showthread.php?threadid=4128
-And to create a "report usefulness" button. A button that can be pushed to tell me if the person liked the page or not. Probably just a yes or no thing...maybe i will log the ISP, because most people viewing it will be from a college, and I'll have a pretty good idea which of my friends it is.

I think I will be going with MySQL as the database format...only because it seems to be the only one that anyone mentions; must be good enough. I think I'm starting to get some of the details of this down.

AND NOW MY QUESTION!
At http://www.php.net/tut.php "Just create your .php3 files and put them in your web directory and the server will magically parse them for you. There is no need to compile anything nor do you need to install any extra tools. "

Well...I'm *lost*. What do I while I'm making the webpage? I dont want to have to pay for a webhost for the 3 months or so that it will probably take me to learn all this... and as I've discovered, if you load "helloworld.php3" (your average first tutorial, first project program) into IE, it does absolutely nothing. And I read a tutorial on MySQL at http://www.awtrey.com/support/dbeweb/ and it keeps on mentioning the command line...again, I'm missing something. Don't I need some sort of developmental program? Something to test out my work on?

I know this probably sounds veerrry stupid to everyone here, but its just an odd concept to me. I really want to test out my 'helloworld' program, and I cant...i've got no idea if i did it right.

I'm hoping there is some sort of personal web server program i can load onto my computer.

Kurt

P.S. Is Apache a version of Linux?
 
to do what you want you need a server on the computer where you write your pages.

install apache on your machine from http://www.apache.org this is the web server.

you may need to play around with the configuration files to get it set up but this is not as hard as it sounds.

now when you goto http://localhost/ on your web browser you get served pages by the web server rather than just of the hard disk directly.

next install php on your machine

follow the instructions to set up php on your pc and change the apache config as told

if you want to use MySQL then download and install that on your computer. You'll also want something like phpMyAdmin which is a php application that lets you do things more easily than using a command line (though still an effort) try something like mysql.com/org you can find phpMyadmin through php.net

all these programs are FREE which is great but also tends to mean that the documentation can be a little brief/techy

Good luck - it's quite easy but will take a while to do if it's your first go at it. Get each program sorted before installing the next



P.S. Is Apache a version of Linux?

linux is an operating system like windows (runs applications)

apache is an application there are versions for windows and linux
 
A simple solution!

Why not sign up with a free webhost (that supports php),
and use that account to test your scripts?
 
when i am writing a script i usually leave the ftp connection open because i keep making changes which saves the trouble of having to reopen the connection again . . .
 
Also if you change the script and it all goes wrong you still have a working backup on your site.

this has saved my life several times.

especially if just making improvements you don't disrupt your sites traffic whilst you play around
 
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