Today I have struggled with PHP. I struggled because I want to recreate the same table using loops with PHP as I did formatting with HTML. If I wasn’t up for a challenge I would let PHP loops format it according the default and I’d be done. In the end I did get the table to display as I wanted but not using for loops. I created a table page, laid it out using the data file I’ve been using for this section, and then using include to add that content where I wanted it to be on the page.
Today the weather app said that it would start raining at 1500 so I didn’t go out for a walk. In the end the rain started at around 1630 or even later. I could have gone for a walk and I could have come back dry or almost dry.
For years I went for walks almost everyday, whatever the weather conditions. I grew tired of the habit. I have had this habit for five years or more, three of which have been during the pandemic.
PHP has been around for decades but I learned of a way to experiment with it easily recently so that is why I am playing with it now. The main page is php as is my first “blog” although it was part of a column for the student newspaper, that I converted to an electronic format and published frequently.
I tried to keep Surfing the World Wide Waves looking as it had back in the day.
I have been following courses for three years now. Within the last week or two I decided to start experimenting with PHP using my website as a guinea pig. I have already converted a few pages to PHP. Some of them use for each loops and others use the include functionality. My aim is to practice the skills that I have studied, within a production environment.
Some of the tasks are repetitive.
Recently I learned that PHP has a built in server. You don’t need xampp or any of the other solutions. All you need is terminal open, have the current directory be the one with the PHP files you want to serve and type: “php -S localhost:8000”
This might sound obvious to some but it took years for me to come across this. When you have to install xampp or other solutions you need to dedicate HD space, run the servers and more.
Today someone on twitter asked this question, and rather than be reply: 320 of 10,000, I chose to write a blog post about it. The TLDR answer is Vanilla JS because if you learn how it works without the help of a framework you understand the language. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have an interest in learning to take full advantage of frameworks.
As I listen to JavaScript Jabber one thing is clear.
If I had been smart I would have changed career path around 2006-2007 when I was in London surrounded by entrepreneurs and web developers, rather than now during a pandemic. Normally I struggle to find new contracts because of two things. The first is that for camera and editing work there are very few opportunities per year, and the opportunities that do arise have hundreds, if not thousands of candidates so the probability of success is low.
Today I tried Switching from MySQL to MariaDB with Infomaniak as a webhost. This morning they sent an e-mail to say that we could switch from MySQL to MariaDB automatically so I tried. For the test I:
downloaded a new install of wordpress to my local machine and put it in the MAMP htdocs folder under mariadb. I installed MariaDB on port 3310. Using the command line I created a wordpress database.
For a while, I have been thinking about creating my own WordPress themes, but I didn’t know where to start or how many hours it would take. I always assumed that it would take many hours and that I would have to create templates, style sheets and more for a number of pages. In reality, you need an index.php page and a stylesheet. Anything else is a bonus.
A shortcut is to find a theme that you like and to see which fields you want to modify and just modify that behaviour.
It’s easy to use Facebook or other CMS every day without thinking about how the code works. This summer I have coded two CMS using Linkedin Learning. One of these CMS was running with PHP and MySQL and the other was running with Ruby On Rails and MySQL.
The PHP CMS In the process I learned how to install MySQL, how to get MySQL and PHP to talk to each other.