Sunday, November 1, 2009

A Novices Experience-PHP5 & MySQL


As an 'internet Marketing' newbie I recently was forced to set up a server on my laptop so I could properly test web-sites written in php code. I am pretty much a html sort of guy and have come back around to the internet after an absence of five or six years, to find things have moved on, and that you need to be able to use this sort of stuff to do Internet marketing properly- article sights, pre made web-sites etc.
I was unable to open these 'pre-made' sights directly in Interent explorer and was only able to get a vague idea of what they looked like by opening them in Dreamweaver- which recognizes php code. I tried to open these sites in a web browser but was told I needed a local server. "How do I do that"? I asked.So, I had no way to see what the final product would look like until I put it on my 'proper' Internet server - not a very efficient way to do things if you want to change elements around.
After a bit of a hunt around on the Internet I discovered that I needed to set up a testing server on my own computer. It seemed the easy way to do this was to get Apache server , PHP, and my SQL database installed on my machine. As there were no e-books available on this. [Is that a Niche Market?] I took a trip to my local bookstore and came away with something I thought would do the job.There I was, filled with excitement and new ideas that this would all be nice and easy. But of course, it wasn't. My first problem was that the book told me to get Apache 1.3. But I could only find only find an Apache two download.
A search for 'Apache 1.3 download 'gives the following 'official' site
http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi -but you have to look closely to find the 'ARCHIVE' file! Which is where the 1.3 versions live. Apparently The PHP people don't think their software works as well on the Apache2 software- probably still being ironed out- but I wanted to do what the book says. Find 1.3 versions here:

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