Bit the bullet

In my last post, I mentioned that I upgraded to php5 on the server where my websites are. I have lots of plans, but I just haven’t felt like doing anything in the evenings. I have lots of plans … just not the desire to start.

Well … I changed that tonite. I upgraded to php5 in my development environment. I only hit one little snag … MySQL wasn’t working. It turned out that I needed to add something to the php.ini file to configure php to have MySQL support. Apparently MySQL support isn’t turned on by default in php5. Thank goodness I found the answer on how to get things working in the support forums for EasyPHP.

In the past, when I did changes to my websites, I’d do the changes and then upload the changes to my webhost to see if things worked. That really was a pain in my ass, but it was the only way I could do it.

I have an old computer tower that I wanted to turn into a web server for testing purposes. But I would basically have to build it from scratch and just use the tower to put it in since the tower is so frickin’ old. But that takes money … and I didn’t have it to spare for something like that.

I managed to run across a program allowing me to run php/apache/MySQL on my computer … EasyPHP. I don’t remember where/how I found it … probably in a web search. But I downloaded it and tried it. It worked great. I can FINALLY develop locally and THEN upload my changes after I know that they work. Awesome!!!

As I said earlier … since I upgraded to php5 on my live server, I wanted to do the same on my local server so I could code in it (especially since I’m used to working with php5 at work). It’s all done and working. No more excuses.

Since I’m sitting here right now, I’m going to start. Where to start? I’m going to start on redoing my database connection class. I know that I can find a lot of classes online for this, but I want to write my own. It’s a good experience, and that way it’ll do what I want it to do. I think I’ll post it here and make it available for download after I’m finished. Now, I’m not saying that my version will be any better than any of the others out there, but maybe there’s someone out there who will find it useful … other than me that it. So stay tuned.