baudrunner's Blog

I like my Saturdays.

Even if nothing else happens on any given Saturday, I'll probably just find myself lying on the.. divan, couch, sofa, chesterfield.. what have you.. with my feet up on the.. coffee table, ottoman, somebody's bare back... whatever, watching another great old TVO Saturday Night At The Movies B&W flick from the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties.. or sometime from the future circa 1989 etc. (Bladerunner is definitely my favorite movie)

Anyway, this Saturday was rewarding in a sense. Don't you dare get the impression that I'm just a lazy bones or anything, I'm the kind of guy that needs to always be doing something. I pursue the lifestyle of a savant(1) , always seeking to add to my repertoire of knowledge.

I have a friend who has a pretty neat website catering to the art poster buying public and who earns a decent three figure monthly supplement to his normal income as a unionized electrician while directing web surfers to e-commerce sites in an affiliate partnership programme. He has decided to align with all the PHP hackers out there and writes exclusively in that web-site development language. So, I finally decided to take a look at PHP.

To that end, today I downloaded the latest version of the Apache server. Then, of course, I downloaded the latest version of PHP.

Now, I've been trying to get a handle on working with web server based data bases lately and thanks to all the software freebies I downloaded and evaluated over the last couple of months I had a pretty good feel for what was required to get everything up and running - server configuration, webroot pathing etc., and believe it or not, for those of you out there who have tried and given up, the learning curve for the Apache/PHP environment was actually pretty steep, so don't give up. In only about an hour or so I had my "hello world" application up and running and WOW!, was I happy! (read surprised). There was an initial snag - Dreamweaver 8 trial version first tried to hog my PHP routine but I did some research and figured out what was wrong - you gotta get into the config file. Anyway, I'm going to take a good look at it and see if I can't finally get around to achieving my initial aim in all of this, which is to get a personal blog/chat site up and running on my limited personal web space without paying out anything beyond my ISP's Basic Lite DSL monthlies. So far so good. I get about 5 meg of personal web space but I think they'll probably not care if I go beyond that - I know, I've talked with tech support over there and they're actually cool.
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(1.)sa·vant(s-vänt)
n
1. A learned person; a scholar.
2..etc.