In my copious spare time I have been known to design and build websites. The first website I ever built was for the first company I worked for, back in 1996, so I’ve been at it a while.
However it’s only been the past couple of years that I’ve started to get some larger clients with grander ideas, and that has meant getting a bit more organised. As such I now have a standard questionnaire that I ask all prospective clients to fill in, a standard design proposal document which I use to present back my ideas based on the answers to the questionnaire, and I have a nice little area of my PC which is dedicated to building websites.
The key part of which is XAMPP.
I discovered this marvellous application about 3 years ago, and if you are building websites, or installing and customising anything that requires MySQL and PHP then you must give it a look.
Many people know from their own experience that it’s not easy to install an Apache web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl.
XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start.
It really is that simple. Once you’ve downloaded it, start up the Control Panel, start Apache and MySQL, then head to http://localhost. Done!
A lot of my web design work is creating custom themes based around WordPress, sometimes it is just a look and feel but more often than not custom code is required. Now, rather than having to upload a file to a test web server somewhere, I can work locally on the php files, and just refresh the browser to see my changes. Much faster.
XAMPP is one of those applications that, after you’ve used it once you think “how the hell did I manage without this!”.
Given that a lot of technical communicators are looking towards other distribution models (blogs, Wikis and so on), then XAMPP is an easy (and free) way to get a test system setup, allowing you to run short proof of concept projects. I hope you find it as useful as I do.
Amen! I can code HTML, and I can hardly read PHP – yet I got XAMPP up and running in under an hour the first time. Since then I’ve repeated the procedure several times in 5 minutes or so.
It’s even portable and can be run off of a USB drive:
http://www.pendriveapps.com/xampp-portable-web-server/
http://portableapps.com/apps/development/xampp
Although not portable like XAMPP, lately I’ve been using ‘stacks’, or bundled applications, from http://www.bitnami.org. Stacks install just like Windows or Mac applications, and include all the files needed to get everything up and running. It’s really helped me with cross-browser testing, etc.