Wed Dec 19 21:35:31 PST 2001

Well, RedHat 7.2 is a pretty nice distribution. Turns out that they did install PHP by default. My brother and I have been debating on and off what we want to run for a web server in terms of scripting languages and databases and content managment.

A while back I took a pretty serious look at Zope (zope.org) but because we are both experienced web programmers, it just didn’t feel quite right, and I was nervous about putting everything into a custom database since I’ve lived through enough changes to realize that you need a way out of whatever format you currently have to whatever the next format is, and with Zope it seemed like you would be more locked into it than with other solutions.

Since our host is a Linux box, ISS/VB was right out (would have been out anyway due to security and functional issues). I was thinking of maybe doing a pure XML/XSLT solution, but that doesn’t cover everything in terms of scripting. I thought of using eperl or some other form of perl based scripting combined with MySQL, but then it would be custom and it would be hard to port the site to a webhosting service later.

So finally I bothered to look into PHP. It’s standardized, common and fairly easy to use with a lot of functionality. It’s also uglier than perl in terms of syntax, but I’m not really going for readiblity with this code anyway. So PHP/MySQL/XML is the way to go for now, so I started with some their hello.php, and then moved on to generate an index for my plan files that I started a while back.

Actually, it turned out to be pretty easy. After about 20 minutes of tinkering I got it working. It reads the directory, filters the filenames with a regular expression and prints out a link to each one of them. All in all, rather straightforward and easy. So now, I’ve got to get info from Phebe on how she wants the site organized and branding and overall layout.

We might actually get quite a ways on it since the weather is cold wet and windy so working on stuff like shelves and workbenches is out since we need to do all the cutting and sanding outside since Phebe is using the garage for lots of clay stuff and the sawdust probably wouldn’t be the best thing to have spread all over the place.

Wed Dec 19 22:45:07 PST 2001

Well, I got a DC kernel compiling and burnt onto a CD such that it boots, but it didn’t have an initrc file, so it didn’t start any consoles. I’ll need to make some mods to merge the recompiled kernel and the new boot process with the rest of a working DC distribution. But sleep is a tad bit more important right now.