OT Really dumb website question.

Not a Guru, but PHP is . . .

Robert Hutchins

>a server-side scripting language itself. You can Google and download it on your own webserver so that you don't have to upload your scripts to your host to test them. PHP is open source; however, your host may have flavors that it supports to the exclusion of others. Given a choice, I would stay away from the packaged ones and use the open source only, but your host must support it. There are many, many extensions and functions; so it is quite possible that your site host restricts the script handler to a subset.

Re: OT Really dumb website question.

Dan Donaldson

>Have you looked at Perl? You can do some neat things with that.

Neither?

Mark Goodall - ATL - tooljunkie

>You just want a website host that supports plain old PHP. PHP Version 5 to be exact. I assume you're using www.php.net as at least once source for your PHP information, right?

If you want to use SSI (server side includes) that's not even really PHP. Both PHP and ASP have the same functionality (the ability to "pull" in code from another file), but SSI is somehwhat independant from those. Perhaps you can think of it as PHP-less and ASP-less file include functionailtiy. Saying this, it's possible that many servers don't use (or allow) SSI anymore. It's been awhile.

One other comment.

A very broad and inexact estimate is that 90% of the internet is Unix-PHP based and only 10% is Windows-ASP based. These figures were perhaps EXACT at SOME point in time because it started out 100%-0% (Unix vs Windows) and Windows has been growing steadily. Oh, and yes, there are other operating systems on the internet, I'm just being general for simplicity. Perhaps today it's 70%-30%, I don't really know.

What I do see is that the ratio of NEW systems being built today favors ASP. I'm finding that the world is turning to ASP faster than many people realize. I've been a PHP and ASP programmer for many, many years and I'd have to say that PHP is simpler, perhaps more "pure" and grassroots, while ASP is a bit more bleeding edge and exciting. I prefer ASP to PHP today, but I think PHP is a little easier to learn.

Happy Woodworking!

You can't load it

Mark Goodall - ATL - tooljunkie

>If you have your own web server (by own, I mean your own physical box, or a co-lo... co-location... box, or a dedicated web server) then it's you that is loading/managing the operating system and any tools, including PHP or whatever, on it yourself.

However, on a share-hosting web server, which I imagine 98% of the population will ever see, you are using a company's (like Earthlink, GoDaddy, whatever) webserver and just have a small portion of it to use for yourself. In this case, THEY mainatin the operating system, and they load,pupply,maintain all the tools, like PHP, etc.

In a shared web hosting situation (by far the most common) you would never be able to load anything other that web page (HTML,PHP,ASP,CSS,etc) files on the server.

Happy Woodworking!

Sorry

Mark Goodall - ATL - tooljunkie

>I re-read your post and realized I misunderstood what you said.

Yes, you can load PHP onto your own webserver (or PC for that matter) and test locally. But as you mentioned, there are so many flavors of PHP that even moving from one PHP server at Earthlink for example to a PHP server at GoDaddy could cause very small differences in the way things work.

One of the reasons that ASP is becoming so popular, is that it's pretty much pre-loaded onto all computers. Alot of people don't realzie it, but the day of setting up your own test server to get started is gone. Your PC has a webserver and most of what you need already.

Happy Woodworking!

Rod, consider Mark and Dan's considerations

Joe in a Cleveland suburb

>I would check out Perl as Don suggested. C programmers love Perl.

But, if you want things to look slick and do it quickly and you have XP Pro (or higher - then you already have the web server i.e. IIS 6.0 so you can build and test locally), I wouldn't hesitate to use ASP.net 2.0. Not Classic ASP. Although there's nothing wrong with Classic ASP.

Mark said:I'm finding that the world is turning to ASP faster than many people realize. I've been a PHP and ASP programmer for many, many years and I'd have to say that PHP is simpler, perhaps more "pure" and grassroots, while ASP is a bit more bleeding edge and exciting.

Me too. We do high end data collection systems for Tier1 and Tier2 Automotive suppliers which interfaces to, and provides data for, MRP/ERP Systems (Baan, SAP, BPCS...). All the ivory tower type execs expect everything to be Microsoft. .Net is also a big buzz word that the corporate IT kids, oops, guys love to hear. They're all Windows Server based shops.

ASP.Net is a great technology. Especially since 2.0 came out. Go to www.asp.net (Microsoft's ASP.net site). Download Visual Web Developer 2005 (VWD2005). It's a free. One of the really nice things is that it has all the hooks in place to play nicely with WIndows and MS Explorer since, of course, it's a MS product. And lets face it, how many non Windows machines do you run into on a daily basis? That said, VWD2005 is cross browser compatible.

Have fun.

Joe

Oh, almost forgot...

Joe in a Cleveland suburb

>At asp.net there are a lot of videos to download to help with all aspects of learning ASP.net and VWD2005 (and Visual Studio). It's tough to beat. Check it out.

Joe

More on SSI

Mark Goodall - ATL - tooljunkie

>I could be wrong, but SSI is a feature of Apache (runs on UNIX) internet servers.

It's built into Apache (others too) and it let's you put a special tag in your HTML document that tells the server to go and get/include another file. It "inserts" if you will another file into your HTML file.

PHP and ASP are similar but obvisouly infintely more powerful. When the server "servers" up a file with .PHP or .ASP as the extension it know it needs to do some "pre-processing" to the file.

With SSI the "pre-processing" is nothing more that including/inserting a file, into the HTML file that is sent(server) to the web surfer.

With PHP or ASP the server "converts" the .ASP or .PHP file (which is HTML coding as well as specific PHP and/or ASP(visual basic) programming) into a file that is sent to the web surfer.

Make sense?

Guess what I'm trying to say is that if you want the ability to include/insert fiels into your .HTML files then SSI is all you need, and you will continue createing .HTML files. IF you want/need more functionailtiy you will be creating .ASP or .PHP files isntead.

Happy Woodworking!

Classic vs .NET

Mark Goodall - ATL - tooljunkie

>(this is more for Bob, since Joe knows this and knows enough to point out the inaccuracies in what I'm going to say)

To oversimplify (only to make a point) ASP .NET (and anything .NET) is really quite complicated while ASP classic is more like PHP.

I don't think I would recommend jumping into ASP .NET without spending a little time at least with regular plain old ASP.

ASP and PHP is like a simple programming language with stuff you may remember for the Basic programming language with things like: define, if then else end if while for next

.NET anything adds about a billion premade "subroutines" and "functions" to it making it very powerful, but can really intimidate a newcomer. If you are looking to start using PHP or ASP, I think I'd look towards a more plain, classic than the .NET stuff. If you go to any book store and look for PHP or ASP books and you'll find dozen of short begginer type books. Look for any .NET books and you'll find plenty but these books will be 4-5 times as thick and will remind you more of old IBM mainframe manuals ;)

There's actually a movement to make VisualBasic easy for the masses again. If you remember back in the 80's and early 90's BASIC was fairly easy and it encouraged millions of people to dablle and do lots of things with it. It was beginners. Visual Basic .NET came out and suddenly it became way too complicated for new people to tackle. Those with experience moved towards the .NET, but it was too much for most new people.

.NET and Visual Studio and .NET 3.0 is great, but if you're starting out, like it sounds like in your original post, look at plain PHP or ASP

Also, if you already have a webhosting service, I'd recommend just starting out playing around with whatever they offer. If they only offer PHP3 or PHP4 for some reason, use it to experiment and get the feel of it. There's nothing worse that finding a book and learning about something only to find it's not easy to find a webhost that supports it.

Happy Woodworking!

Thanks, guys.

Rod Peterson -- Ormond Beach

>I'll keep this simple, as I don't want to expose any more ignorance than I already have. Although I'm an experienced HTML guy, and flatter myself that I understand CSS even though my implementation is rudimentary, all this SSI (which I understand what it means) stuff is virgin territory for me.

Last night I directed the install of the phpWebSite which my host offers, and where yesterday I got a server error when I called the hello.php file I had written and uploaded, today my screen has the nicest little “hello, world” in black-serif-typeface-on-white-screen you have ever seen. So, I'm off and running. I can't wait for the next victory.

Anyway, what I have been looking to do for a long time (even posted a query about it on Badger Pond years ago, but probably didn't grasp the answer out of the responses) is to be able to standardize the footer that's on every page on my site into one file and have that pulled into each of the pages. Thus, much like the rest of CSS, I'd be able to make changes to a single file that would affect all 500+ pages on the site.

Mark made it sound feasible, and my initial forays into the various tutorials seem to reinforce that, but I had to get past having the functionality on my host. Now I do…or have…or something.

Thanks, all.

Rod

Here's how to do it:

Mark Goodall - ATL - tooljunkie

>Create the file: footer.html which contains:

< center > & copy ; 2007 Rod Butcher < / center >

Then for SSI in your HMTL files put:

< ! -- #include file="footer.html" -- >

< / body>

Or in your .ASP files put:

< ! -- #include file="footer.html" -- >

< / body>

Or in your .PHP files put:

< ? php include "footer.html"; ? >

< / body>

The SSI method works on UNIX and Windows Servers (it's so universal that in fact the ASP method actually is the SSI method, but the SSI method also works in Unix-PHP environments)

Here's the trick:

< ! -- #include file="footer.html" -- >

and

< ! -- #include virtual="footer.html" -- >

are two different things, and have to do with the RELATIVE path/location to the file. Lots of people have trouble with this.

The PHP only version:

< ? php include "footer.html"; ? >

works on 100% of the PHP server's I've seen and that's dozens, maybe not hundreds.

Happy Woodworking!

The other trick

Mark Goodall - ATL - tooljunkie

>Wow! 500+ HTML pages. Using templates or includes will help but you still have 500+ static HTML pages. Just to give you an idea, I routinely build web sites that as 200-2000 pages in size, but I actually only create a half-dozen or so "dymamic" pages. But that's getting you into the more sophisticated PHP/ASP world with SQL and XML and all the other tricks of the trade. I'm also sometimes tasked with the project to take a 500+ page website that was coded over many years by moer than one person, and turn it from a mass of mismatched failure prone pages to a dymanic site driven by onely a dozen actual pages.

The downside to all of this is if you misplace one character or make one typo in a 500+ page static page thne only 1 of 500 ( or 0.2%) of the site goes down. Make one typo in a ASP dymamic page and it could cause a 2000 page site to go down, or a dozen 200 page sites to go down ;)

The really cool thing about this, is that once you start off with your "hello world" in PHP it isn't long till you find all sorts or great and powerful uses from even the simplest of PHP commands. Just a couple of the simlpest PHP or ASP commands can change the way you do things forever. And the include command, which you'll master in no time, is the start!

Happy Woodworking!

Re: Thanks, guys.

Dan Donaldson

>Seems like you should be able to do this with a css box at the bottom of your pages that has content equal to your footer file. that way, if you change the file, all of the content would change, with no scripting required.

Mark, Mark, Mark…

Rod Peterson -- Ormond Beach

><center>

That's so '90s. <center> has been marked for deprecation. The recommended alternatives are a center argument to the align parameter in various elements, such as <div>, or <p>. For example <div align="center">.

But you knew that…I haven't used <center> for at least three years.

Thanks for the help.

Rod

Re: Classic vs .NET

Donald Pierson

>First I consider myself a Neanderthal programmer�being able to write MPY for multiply rather than its hexadecimal code was a breakthrough and self-modifying code was a requirement rather than forbidden. I moved into the .NET world a few months ago and the learning curve is a slippery slope at best unless you like things like canonical polymorphism. However I gather it is directed toward platform independence which is a good thing as Martha would say.

I have been using MS Visual Studio 2005 Standard edition for a while now and perfer it over my old Visual Basic 6. You can choose between several languages...C++,C#,VB,J#,HTML, etc. You can write windows programs and website programs. But it was quantum leap for me into this .NET world!

Don in Vancouver,WA,USA

Re: Thanks, guys.

Rod Peterson -- Ormond Beach

>> Seems like you should be able to do this with a css box at the bottom of your pages that has content equal to your footer file.

You would think so, but I've searched all over the CSS specification and can't find a way. In fact, that's what prompted my query on BP several years ago. You see, I've used “style sheets” and variations of them since the '80s. WordPerfect had a very powerful implementation of it that is unmatched by Word in virtually every respect. The newsletter that I wrote for our local ham radio club was loaded with styles and was very easy to prepare each month by just adding content to a template.

There was also a very powerful form letter capability which is more like what I'm looking to do whereby you could set up a template to call various paragraphs from separate files based on certain paramters. For example, if you set a gender flag for female it would change all of the instances in the document of the variable associated with it to Mrs. (or Ms. if you refined it even further). It would also pull in the appropriate paragraphs that would apply to females which might have had different content than would a letter to males.

How I implemented one in particular was a courtesy thank you note I would send to attendees of FCC Exam sessions that I used to run. I had variables for the type of test they took (written or Morse code), the element of test they took (Novice, Technician, General, Advanced, Extra), and whether they passed any, all, or none of them, and whether they were able to immediately operate with the new priveleges. Looking back at it now, I'm kind of amazed I was able to figure that out.

I'm getting closer to that dream with this conversation. I appreciate everyone's input and assistance.

Rod

Care to Elaborate ?

Robert Hutchins

>"One of the reasons that ASP is becoming so popular, is that it's pretty much pre-loaded onto all computers. Alot of people don't realzie it, but the day of setting up your own test server to get started is gone. Your PC has a webserver and most of what you need already."

Knowing that it has been 40+ years since I was on top of things technical, I usually do a lot of reading (books and the Internet) before jumping in. Recently I decided that I could no longer tolerate uploading everything to GoDaddy to test it - with all the disruption attendant to that path - and went about creating my own web server with Apache, PHP, MySQL, et al. Are you telling me that I don't need to -- no SHOULDN'T - go through this in order to write and test my own web pages? . . . that I should be using .NET and .ASP instead of PHP and CSS? What is native to Windows XP Pro that displaces the need for a server like I described?

Rub my nose in it, please; but, also - please - point me to some resources I can read up on.

Yabutt....

Mark Goodall - ATL - tooljunkie

>I copy/pasted that example from code I wrote 8 years ago ;) ;)

But, really, it's easier to use < CENTER > in an example for someone, because I figure most people might find it easier to understand than < DIV ALIGN=CENTER > which could be mis-interpretted at "Divide the Center Line" ;) ;)

Happy Woodworking!

Sure

Mark Goodall - ATL - tooljunkie

>IIS (Internet Information Services) is Microsoft's version of Unix's Apache. It comes as part of the OS in Windows2003 Server AS WELL AS WITH WindowsXP. You activate it by Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs, Add Windows Components > IIS

There's a little more to it than just that, but if you installed Apache then you'll able to handle IIS.

For the record:

Unix vs MS-Windows

Apache vs MS-IIS

PHP vs ASP

MySQL vs MS-SQL

But HTML, CSS and JAVA is applicable to both environments.

CSS is not just for PHP.

THink of it this way.... the server either talks PHP or ASP.

Your BROWSER talks HTML, CSS and JAVA.

Makes more sense?

The anti-MS people complain about MS, but MS will take over the world someday, and they will be using Robots (robotics). Mark my words! When you and are are both locked up in the same cell (by the Robots) you'll say to me "Oh, THAT's what you were talking about, Mark"

Happy Woodworking!

Told you it was '90s…

Rod Peterson -- Ormond Beach

>

OK, Mark. I misread your post.

Robert Hutchins

>What you are saying is that you choose one or the other . . . Apache and PHP or IIS and ASP. I thought you were saying that IIS would run it all.

I chose to go with Apache/PHP (and MySQL) because it is my understanding that about 99.9% of all internet servers run Unix in one flavor or another (Linux, Unix, et al). Because I'm writing stuff to be served on a hosted server running a Unix variant, I thought it would be better to have its tools on my local host. I guess extending that logic would lead me to a Linux OS with Apache/PHP/MySQL . . . no! wait! I've got a Ubuntu CD. Now to learn how to install dual boot OS's. When do I get to go back to draining the swamp?

Thanks for clearing up my misunderstanding.

L.A.M.P.

Joe Piotrowski - Chicago Burb's

>Linux. Apache. My-sql. Php.

official acronym of the open source movement. you can seasrch for that LAMP for more info.

add in the eclispe editor. I thought I read that it has a plug in for net beans so it's a nice free EDI for all your java programming.

that project grows and grows and new features are there ever quarter or two. before you know it you can be a full fledge developer making big bucks.

IMO, hand coding html tags is a waste of time. it's like using an ink well and a feather instead of a ball point pen.

it is good to know to fix something by hand in an emergency but a decent web authoring tool, and there are many free ones, will take care of the work 8000% faster.

as soon as My workload calms down I plan on diving back into the web technology for kicks. but all open source. I'm touched in the head a little.

Have fun!

No, you read correctly

Mark Goodall - ATL - tooljunkie

>I think you did understand. You didn't need to do all that and with IIS because with IIS you DO have it all (in general terms).

Fundamentally you need a Browser and a Server.

The Servers needs to server up static pages (HTML) and active pages (ASP or PHP) and handle a database (MS-SQL or MySQL).

Out of the box on WindowsXP you have IIS which does HTML and ASP. You can install the free VisualBasic or VisualWebDesigner and it gives you MS-SQL. And you can install PHP on a Windows box and have both ASP and PHP on the same box. You cannot install ASP on a Linux box, however.

There is fundamentally no difference between MS-SQL, MySQL, OracleSQL, PervasiveSQL or any other SQL server, because if it adheres to the SQL rules SQL is SQL.

So I think you did understood what I was saying. You didn't really need to install Apache, MySQL, etc. You did if you wanted to mimic a Unix host, but so many new people are finding the MS stuff easier, at least to setup, that they tinker around with it on there PC and the neext thing you know they are demanding that web hosts offer Windows hosting.

An my other comment was just that: Yes at ONE point 90% of the internet ran on Unix/Apache but today 90% of NEW applciations are ASP based (not fact just a figure) so what was 90-10 a few years ago, and 80-20 will be 40-60 and may be 50-50 and 10-90 one day.

Adobe is the far and away leader in what they do. OpenSource is also because it was free. But make something free AND automatically installed (easy) and which will people tend to use?

You did the right thing installing what you did, based on what you wanted. I'm just saying that you didn't HAVE to, and that most people today don't. I'm talking mostly about beginners.

PHP/Apache/Unix aren't going away. But it's loosing ground. When you start off with 99.9% there's nowhere to go but down ;)

Happy Woodworking!

Thanks, Mark. You Orta Charge for these Consults:

Robert Hutchins

>