Working with local development copies of websites can get to be a bit messy after a period of time, especially when you are developing work applications and personal applications on the same machine. So I figured I would share the method that I use to keep everything organized on my machine, and on my previous development machines. The focus of this article will be on Windows Machines running XAMPP or WAMP (or even straight apache).
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Setting up Local VirtualHosts with Apache (Including XAMPP or WAMP)
Using cURL to Grab Data
Using cURL is a simple and effective way to gather data from another website, run it through a script, parse the data and transform it into something useful that you can use on your website. Whether you are “scraping” data to build a summary of a link, pulling an XML file to parse into a database, or just simply wanting to get the contents of the file, cURL is a simple and effective way to pull the data from an outside source into your page.
PHP Basics – Syntax for Dummies
There is a lot of PHP specific syntax that every PHP programmer uses in their day to day work, that everyone has just learned that it is the way it is meant to be. But, to truly be able to go through, read someone’s code and truly understand it, you need to know exactly what the syntax means, and why it’s formatted that way. Throughout this small post, there are just some thoughts and practices for coding using the PHP syntax.
PHP Basics – The Operators (Part 2)
In our first section, we talked about the multiple ways that you can use the equals sign to assign variables or compare them, based on value and type. In part 2 of this series, we are going to dive deeper into the comparison operators, and exactly how they function. There is a lot of basic programming concepts here, but where better to start than the basics.
PHP Basics – The Array
One of the fundamental variable types, yet one of the more complex when you are beginning, is the Array. The array just takes a little bit to wrap your mind around, or maybe a good analogy as to exactly what it is doing.
You can pretty much think of an array as a mini-storage unit for variables, someplace to order them, keep them in one space, and reference them by name dynamically. There are more advanced ways to do some of this as well but arrays are a good starting point.
PHP Basics – The Operators (Part 1)
Coming into PHP fresh, you may notice a few things that don’t exactly line up with some of the other programming languages out there. In this initial “Operators” post, I am going to talk a little bit about the different operators that are available for people programming in PHP. There are different ways to compare and assign variables, as well as the reasons you might want to use each of these. It’s a good springboard or starting point for starting to understand PHP.
Quick Introduction
I figured this would be a good time for a quick explanation of my goals and aspirations here.
The purpose of my writings within this blog are to sit and think about the web development in my everyday life, put into words the challenges and obstacles I encounter, in hopes to improve the quality of code I can produce. By making it a public format, a blog, I hope that some of the code snippets and ideas I post up will help you out as this personal project roles onwards.
From time to time, I also may review software or applications I use in my day to day life, or simply just come up with a few list posts of things that I find useful, and hopefully you will too.
Currently the direction I am heading is OO Programming with PHP and using the Zend Framework. The first post, hopefully within the next few days, will elaborate on how I got started with the ZF and how I am implementing it to develop applications for my job and life rapidly.