It’s Friday, one week in to this project, and as I mentioned in an earlier comment, I reserve the right to go back and change my mind about any of the options I’ve worked with and what I’ve put together. Today, I am doing exactly that.
For those who read last week’s entry, I sad it would be worth your time to install the needed software on your base machine, so that you could get a feel for each of the components and what it takes to do that. While I still think there’s a vale to doing that, after having to uninstall, reinstall, unconfigure, reconfigure, modify, point somewhere else, change options again, and then notice that my hardware machines just don’t quite line up the way I expect them to, I have decided to heed the call of so many who left their comments on my post from last week.
In this first block of stuff, I hereby wholeheartedly recommend that you set up a virtual machine to do this work. Set up several if you’d like, but your sanity will be preserved, and have a few extra benefits:
– you can play what if with multiple machines if you choose
– if you decide to use a Linux virtual machine, your CPU, memory and disk footprint to run the VM is really small.
– applications like VirtualBox and VMWare server allow for saving states and for taking snapshots. It’s sort of an on-the-cheap version control, and it can save you from shooting yourself in the foot. Much more so that using your base environment to do all of this.
– set up Dropbox or some other file share location, and you’re golden, everything that matters gets placed in a spot where it can be accessed as you need it.
I had every intention of bringing VM’s into the conversation at some point, but this past week made me decide now was the best time. If you want to do these exercises in both a hardware machine and a VM, you’ll learn a lot. You’ll learn a lot by sticking your tongue on an icy pole in the dead of winter, too. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide if some learning is best done vicariously. In any event, if you’ve taken the VM route with this, smart move, you won’t regret it.
Next step is to set up a site with PHP. That would be great if I knew enough PHP to set up a site. Today, I can say I almost know enough to do that. PHP insertion is super easy. It’s just a tag, in this case ” to close, and and some basic code that would look very familiar to anyone who has ever written a sample program in C or another language anything between the tags is PHP doing the work.
//dot (“.”) is the concatenation element (like + in JavaScript)
echo “Say” . ” something” . ” witty!”;
$teabags = 0;
if ($teabags > 0) {
echo “There are $teabags tea bags! I’ll have a cup!”;
} else {
echo “No more tea! I guess I won’t have a cup.”;
}
?>
If you create the front end page to evaluate PHP, it will happily do so. Note, you will need to save your pages with a .php extension, instead of .html, to do this. If there’s other ways to do this, be patient with me, I haven’t gotten that far yet ;).
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