Comments on: Fewer Web Pages

By: Jay Pfaffman

Jay Pfaffman — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 14:32:35 +0000

I try to teach my students that computers are good at only one thing: doing the same thing over and over. Humans are bad at that. If you find yourself doing the same thing over and over and you're using a computer, you're doing something wrong. I started using PHP about 10 years ago when I wrote Webliographer, a URL database. I'm much too lazy now to write my own scripts to format stuff, but it wasn't until I started using Drupal that I started putting stuff on the web again. I don't understand how anyone creates static HTML pages. I'm much too lazy for that.

By: Alan

Alan — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 16:01:52 +0000

First of all thanks Tom for noting an error on the MIL page– My code had a relative link built wrong, but it was one edit to fix ;-) Here is something else that I have found valuable- a web audience that is willing to let you know of things that do not work or do not make sense.

Also, one thing I left out was building re-directs for all of the old *.html files. I am really against moving/renaming web files and not leaving a redirection or even a note. So for all of the old *.html files, I used a simple format at Meta-Refresh tag:

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mil/projects.html

As far as learning PHP/MySQL, I am hard pressed to recommend specific resources as it really depends on your style of learning and proficiency at coding, logic, etc.

I think I had purchased a basic MySQL / PHP Intro book (the title escapes me but it was noty a thick tome). Maybe something like PHP/MySQl for the Absolute Beginner:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1592004946

You will; find plently of online tutroials by Googling PHP mysql +tutorial

A nifty interactive site to learn the basics of writing SQL statements is http://sqlcourse.com/ and the followup http://sqlcourse2.com/ In fact, the original version of this was crfeated by a colleague here at Maricopa– a real code genius.

I also continue to pick up a lot of learning from just using the online PHP reference http://www.php.net/ as each entry has user contributed notes. And then there are tonrs of libraries of exisiting PHP code you can not only use but learn some code techniques.

And finally, it helps to have a small project you can learn as you do. I never got far with just book or tutorial examples; it always made more sense to me as I learned by doing ym own projects.

Best of luck! I’ve been doing this for about 4-5 years and still have a long way to go.

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 19:37:32 +0000

A great point and something I’m trying to get our school district to go towards. We have several huge content resource sites that are over a hundred pages of static html (not even any css). They are a huge pain to update and often even worse for users in my opinion. Both those things equal less frequent updates and much less use of what is very good information.

I’m looking to pick up some mySQL/PHP skills anyway. Do you have any recommendations for tutorials or books?

By the way- for some reason I’m getting 404′s off of the package links on your http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mil/projects.php page. I’m running Safari 2.0.2. Thought you might want to know.