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Here's a link to an article published yesterday that should be helpful to folks looking for free hosting options. I used to work for a commercial web host, so I think it's amazing what you can get from a free web host these days.
If you're looking into hosting, I have three dedicated servers where you could host: CMS, databases, standard HTML, whatever you decide. I also do design, so if you're interested I can send you my portfolio, and you can check out my servers as well. I am very flexible with my servers, so if there is anything that you would need, that can be accomodated. I am running Debian, Solaris, and FreeBSD all with Apache2, mod-ssl, PHP, Perl (CGI), Postresql and MySQL databases. I have extremely easy to use interfaces for the SQL databases that I have designed.
This isn't entirely the solution I seek - but I stumbled onto this the other day (by reading an advertisement in the NYTimes on paper).
I think this is pretty exciting Telnic | the home of .tel and I'd love the opinions of people here who know more about the guts of the internet than I (that would be most of you )
First download and install XAMPP, this will install a local apache server on your machine and give you all the tools you get from a host like PHP and MySql. You don't necessarily need these but what it does is provide a testing enviroment even for simple HTMl web pages. Once you start learning things the PHP and Mysql end of it can open many doors...
Next you need an text editor, even if you're going to use a WYSIWG editor in the future it's important you get a decent foundation in understanding HTML and CSS. For that you need to work with a text editor. There's two free ones I'll recommend:
The first one is pretty advanced, the second one is advanced too but it also comes with a WYSIWYG panel too. You can switch betweeen text and WYSIWYG mode.
Once you have you're shiny new editor installed you'll want to head here for some basic HTML tutorials:
HTML and CSS are intertwined so you really want to understand a little of both before moving onto advanced HTML tutorials and finally adavanced CSS tutorials.
Once you get basic understanding of these you can make a decision to move onto a pure WYSIWG editor but remember the power of HTML and CSS lies in understanding how to code it yourself.
If dare to venture you can move into the promised land called PHP. PHP is server side programming language that can do many things. For example this forum software you are using right now is run off of PHP and probably a MySql backend for a databse.
It's PHP which is closely related to Javascript, it may actually work in JS but I don't know JS enough to confirm that. Most computer languages have similarities.
The difference between PHP and Javascript is PHP is executed on the server before being sent to the client. Using my example from above I'll expand it a little. We'll call this file test.php and upload to the server. Note your server will need PHP installed for this to work, most servers do as its the most widely used programming language for the web:
Quote:
<html>
<head>
<title>My PHP Test page</title>
</head>
<body>
Broken down since this particular file starts out as text this is directly sent to the browser by the server:
Quote:
<html>
<head>
<title>My PHP Test page</title>
</head>
<body>
When the server hits the php tag it switches to PHP mode
Quote:
<?php
The next two lines are assiging values to the variables, the variable $obama equals President and the variable $mccain equals Senator:
Quote:
$obama = 'President';
$mccain = 'Senator';
This is an if statement, the double equal signs do not assign a value but instead is comparison and literally means "is equal too" So what we're asking is IF the variable $obama is equal too President.
Quote:
if ($obama == "President")
Since this comparison statement evaluates to true the code between the brackets is executed:
Quote:
{
echo 'We're doomed!';
}
This will add the text we're doomed to the output to the browser. If the comparison statement had evaluated to false and the variable $obama was not eqaul to President then the code between the brackets following the else would be executed:
Quote:
{
echo 'We're Saved!';
}
The server will go out of PHP mode an start outputting text once it hits the ending PHP tag:
Quote:
?>
</body>
</html>
The file served to someone who visits this page with a browser will look like this, the PHP is not sent them to them:
Quote:
<html>
<head>
<title>My PHP Test page</title>
</head>
<body>
We're doomed!
</body>
</html>
Simple right? ;P ....and yes I know Obama isn't President yet.
Last edited by thecoalman; 11-18-2008 at 05:50 AM..
It's a pretty simple example, you can do just about anything with PHP there is a lot of possibilities. The language was written with the intentions it be used for serving HTML pages. When you combine it with a database you can create pages like this forum.
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.tel (!)
PHP is server side programming language that can do many things. For example this forum software you are using right now is run off of PHP and probably a MySql backend for a databse. 
