Well after a lot of writing and some screen shots I’ve described most of my web development experience on the Why page. I’ve even pulled out a ancient site I created and hosted for a hobby of mine more than 4 years ago, X-Bots.

Well I’ve started to create a portfolio site finally. I’ll use this site to share tips and tricks that I’ve learned over the years and to provide information about the projects I’ve been involved in.

So far I’ve created a little graphics, a bare bones template, css and a simple PHP/MySQL news page from scratch.

My telephone number and a contact form are located on this page. Before this I hadn’t utilized the PEAR packages very much but I was able to install the PEAR package manager and add the Mail module to it. I had to use the PEAR::Mail module because the mail server I wanted to use required SMTP auth and SSL. I had an SMTP auth solution already but it didn’t support SSL and since PEAR made it so darn easy I decided to dig into that . I did have a little trouble installing it at first but the power of Google and good souls floating around in the internets provided articles with solutions!

Now onto the showcase (Why) page of my work!

It includes a short bio about my computer related history, a list of skills relating to web development, my education background and a list of companies I’ve done web development for. I’ve almost completed the contact (Where) page then I will move to the meat of this all, the showcase of my work (Why).

I had a little trouble with the PHP 5.3 and Apache 2.2.14. I have PHP installed as an Apache module. One of the PHP extensions, php_pgsql.dll, that’s loaded by default in PHP 5.3 was preventing Apache from starting. Luckily I’ve run into that problem before so one by one I commented out the PHP extensions in the php.ini until I discovered php_pgsql.dll was the problem. I didn’t need it anyway so no problem leaving that disabled.

After that I started to notice that whenever I interacted with a variable that was undefined/uninitialized that PHP would fail to produce an page and no error was reported. After a couple hours of researching and updating this old (but reliable) server I switched to using the php-cgi under Apache and I started getting errors reported about the date.timezone directive in the php.ini not being set. The error message indicated that it assumed a timezone for me but once I set it in the php.ini then switched back to loading PHP as an Apache module I was able to interact with undefined/uninitialized variables without ill effect.