PHP programming language – Geoff Fox: My Permanent Record

Web Design: Satisfying Accomplishment

Most of you reading this are already lost, right?

I spent most of last night in my office working on a website. It’s a little thing I’m doing for myself, five or six pages with some video. It’s difficult to explain the feeling, but creating a website is really rewarding in a creative way.

The first step was installing WordPress on a webserver. It only takes a few minutes. WordPress is very mature. Ease is built in.

Most of you reading this are already lost, right? Here’s WordPresses own explanation.

WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 25 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.

This site is built on WordPress too. The new site looks nothing like this!

WordPresses ‘themes’ creates the look. There are thousands of themes I could have used, but I modified the on that comes standard (it’s called Twenty Ten). That’s the most rewarding part!

Reskinning the theme requires a little programming skill in wrangling three languages: php, css and html. I know just enough to be dangerous. That means I’m writing with a few books at the ready because there will be questions! If I did this more I’d be a lot faster.

It’s all so elegant. Within a few minutes what began as an instantly familiar barebones WordPress site began to look like the site I wanted!

I spent five hours working on the site last night. It’s nearly done. Later tonight or tomorrow it will be done.

I have a very satisfying feeling of accomplishment.

The New Blog Arrives

There will probably be things wrong with this site. I moved six years of stuff from one platform to another. It was tough and I was diligent but I’m no miracle worker!

It’s just about 4:00 AM. Things are quiet. I picked this as the right time to move my website. At least here in Hamden the move is a success.

There is no computer named geofffox.com or yahoo.com or any other URL. The Internet is really all about numbers and not even easily understood numbers! Each website is identified by four digits between 0 and 255. That’s too tough so a system was set up to translate more memorable words into the numbers. My wait over the past few hours was for my name to be associated with a new set of numbers.

There will probably be things wrong with this site. I moved six years of stuff from one platform to another. It was tough and I was diligent but I’m no miracle worker!

Switching from MoveableType to WordPress should make my life easier. I now have an app built into my iPhone which natively talks with the website’s ‘back end.’ The photo attached to this entry was directly placed by the phone. WP will also work better with video.

If you see stuff that’s not working, leave a comment or drop me an email. I’m the web wrangler here. I want to know.

Fix It Until It Breaks

The deeper I got into the site the more wasn’t working and I was finding stuff no one had found before. It’s not supposed to be like this.

It’s been like performing dentistry on myself! The goal was to make my life simpler by developing the new look for my website on a server installed on my desktop PC then move it to a commercial server when finished. Maybe it will be easier. It hasn’t been so far!

When I went to move it off the desktop machine to its final resting place the site responded with an error message. Later it was the “white screen of death.” Finally I could see the home page but all links, even links to log in, were dead!

These are the times that try men’s souls. I had achieved Helaine’s oft spoken fear when I delve too deeply. I’d fixed it to the point of breaking it!

In an earlier entry the subject of the “WordPress Community” came up. WordPress is the platform on which the new site will be built. The community was there for me tonight, though not in the flesh. There is a treasure trove of archived forum posts online.
If something can be broken it already has been! I was able to go to school on other poor schlubs.

I wrote what you just read around 3:30 am. Before I could start patting myself on the back things broke so badly I had to stop writing. I didn’t get to bed until nearly 6:00 am.

It’s now after 1:00 pm. Where were we?

The deeper I got into the site the more wasn’t working and I was finding stuff broken no one had found before! It’s not supposed to be like this.

I started deleting plug-ins, which add functionality. That’s the typical response to this kind of problem and it usually works. Not here.
I will spare you my tooth gnashing. The problem seems to be a version of php, a programming language critical to blogging (and other dynamic sites). The blog was built with php5, the current version. My web host offers php5, but defaults to php4. They are not the same–think Latin and Pig Latin.

Worse still, when I finally found and put in the fix (the line “AddType x-mapp-php5 .php” was inserted in a hidden file called .htaccess) I left out the space between php5 and .php! Now the site was so dead I couldn’t even get to the administration screens!
It’s all fixed now and the site is up, but hidden in plain site at a different web address for the time being. There are still cosmetic fixes that need to be made. Sometimes text gets larger and smaller for no apparent reason. Mostly though I accomplished what I set out to do and I hardly pulled out any hair.

The new look debuts this weekend–maybe.

We Are Driven To Hack

Early this afternoon I shot off a very technical question full of cryptic source code. It concluded, “Can someone give me a hand, please?”

Back in the good old days computing and the Internet were filled with hackers. These weren’t the nefarious steal your bank account hackers of the 21^st Century but more like computing McGyvers.

Mostly guys, they liked what they were doing and wanted to share. While at Emerson College in the late 60s I’d often go to MIT and hang out with them. Socially awkward in most cases, they had plenty of time to hack.

The Internet is different today. Computing is different too. I am the rare exception, someone who still builds his own machines–a chore which surely costs more than buying one in a store. To most people a computer is another appliance and they’d no sooner build their own than they’d build their toaster.

Hackers are still around. We’re more hidden now. Names that impress you, like Microsoft or McAfee, leave us cold. Real hackers play with FOSS–Free and Open Source Software.

If you use Firefox and you click deep enough within the menus you’ll finally come to a spot where it’s revealed, “All of the source code to this product is available under licenses which are both free and open source.” Hell yeah it is.

The same freeware philosophy drives Linux and Apache and MySQL. Those three names might not mean much to you, but the Internet is firmly built on them much to Microsoft’s chagrin.

My still-in-design blog is also FOSS. It’s built on WordPress which carries a GNU General Public License.

“The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software — to make sure the software is free for all its users.”

The hackers are alive and well and supporting WordPress!

Though well documented (and I actually do read the docs) yesterday I ran into a WordPress dead end I couldn’t back out from. There is no help desk to call. My tech support was the WordPress community.

Early this afternoon I shot off a very technical question full of cryptic source code. It concluded, “Can someone give me a hand, please?”

Within ten minutes there was a first response–a request for more info. The conversation went back-and-forth as I better explained the situation. Sometimes the afflicted don’t know enough to even ask the right question! That was me.

“If you can post your complete code (from whichever file you’re doing this in), I’ll show you where to make changes.” A stranger was offering assistance.

I did. He did. The fix worked perfectly! And not only does it work, the fix is well documented so I can learn from it and replicate it later if I need to.

I don’t really know who “t31os_” is or where he’s located. He felt my pain. He coded the fix.

We all have to start somewhere, I’m just a coding hobbyist myself, all self taught, I’m by no means a guru, so no need to be embarrassed.

This is the spirit of hacking. This is what continues to fuel my deep affection for computing.

What “t31os_” is for me I am for others. I’ve done surgery for friends dozens of times making their dead PCs once again reach out for the viruses and porn that got them into trouble in the first place!

If you read the geek websites you’ll see ominous hints that some companies want to throttle FOSS and hackers. We are a threat to their existence, or at least their current profit margin.

In the meantime we’re driven to hack and unlikely to stop.

There’s A Boatload I Don’t Know

It’s going to be a long night. There’s a boatload I don’t know and will only learn while banging my head against the wall!

Helaine and Stef are in California. I am in Connecticut. Actually, the more important “I am” sentence would be: I am in pajamas! This is a day at the computer hacking code.

If you’ve been following along you know I’ve become somewhat obsessed with changing my website–moving it from Moveabletype to WordPress and updating the look. A few weeks ago the job was 85% done. Then I did a design for a friend’s blog and the idea of designing from scratch became appealing.

Designing from scratch is a term with a multitude of definitions. If you’re a woodworker do you have to grow the trees too? In this case too scratch doesn’t start at zero but reasonably far down the chain. I am using 960BC with provides the minimal link between WordPress and the 960 Grid System.

For me this has become a methodical process. I’ve installed a small server and database manager on my PC. That allows me to do all my work locally without moving files to and from the remote server the project will end on. It also forces me to follow proper procedures in keeping the code ‘server agnostic.’

If I code for this server, instead of any server, the website will break when I move it to its final home.

It’s going to be a long night. There’s a boatload I don’t know and will only learn while banging my head against the wall!

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