Programming blog – Discussions, Tutorials, Resources
In this screencast I walk you through how to set up virtual hosts on your local development server, specifically Wampserver on Windows.
As promised in the screencast I am appending a written version of the process on this post for your reference.
Continue reading “How to Set Up Virtual Hosts on your Local Host”
I know it’s been a while since I posted a new tutorial on this blog. The long and short of it is that I am finally officially matriculated into my graduate program so things have been rather hectic in my neck of the woods. I just completed my first week of classes and right now I’m trying as hard as I can to keep my head above the water and not get behind and swamped with reading and such. It’s the first week but the program has started with a bang!! It’s definitely going to be a hairy couple of weeks but things should settle down in the next month or so and I should be able to resume posting on a somewhat regular schedule (I hope, really really hope!)
For those who’ve posted comments on different posts and I haven’t replied, again I apologize. I’ll be making some time over the next week to get caught up on the comments and to respond to them. If you’ve emailed me directly with a question I believe I have responded to everyone. If not, please resend your email because I may not have received it.
I have more MODx tutorials in the works as well as Drupal tutorials. My plan is to finish out the beginner series and then delve into more intermediate and advanced stuff, and also just start making general posts on doing different things with MODx and Drupal. I haven’t completely charted out this part of it but I do have several ideas churning around in my mind.
I’m also experimenting with screencasting! 🙂 I’m a very visual learner and find screencasts to be very useful so I’m hoping to overcome my mic-shyness and start posting some screencasts on here soon. I use a PC so any suggestions on programs to use (preferably free) are welcome. So far I’ve experimented with Camstudio and it looks good. But I don’t have a good mic and can’t really think about buying one at the moment, although I do keep checking ebay for good deals.
Thanks everyone for hanging in there with me. Keep checking in, subscribe to my rss feed and follow me on Twitter so you can know when new posts and tutorials go up. And if you find this blog useful, please feel free to donate something small or big 🙂 to keep me going, or even just drop a note to say hello.
In this post I’m going to go a little off track and talk about non-web stuff 🙂 I recently decided to take my old IBM Thinkpad T43 and wipe it clean so I could test the Windows 7 RC OS on it. I have only now started playing with it and testing it. The first challenge I have faced so far is getting the wireless card to work. However, I have finally resolved it with a little help from Google.
Here’s how you can get it to work.
Continue reading “Getting the Wireless Card to Work with Windows 7 on the Thinkpad T43p”
There is an abundance of information and tutorials out there to help any aspiring developer/designer learn from scratch how to do the things they want to learn to do. Heck, here’s a lot of information out there to help you discover WHAT it is you want to learn to do 🙂 . And the best things about it is that most of it is free and easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection. What this means is that it is easy to assume that all one needs to embark on learning enough to build a career as a developer/designer/programmer is three things:
Gone are the days when you couldn’t really learn much of substance without going to school for a couple of years at least, paying tuition, buying huge volumes of books, and paying for expensive tools and software. Today, you almost never even need to buy a book, or so it seems. With numerous blogs and tutorial sites (written and video) out there, it seems like a simple matter to pick up all the skills you need, use free tools, and build yourself a career. In addition, most of the tools you will ever need to get started are free/open source, whether it’s compilers, IDE’s, etc.
As with everything else though, we need to put on our thinking hats and critically consider the pros and cons of this amazing accessibility that we have to knowledge.
Continue reading “Strengths and Pitfalls of Online Tutorials for Beginners (Developers/Programmers)”
After my post on flat-file content management systems, I learned about a new CMS that started out as a fork of the nanoCMS that I referenced in my earlier post. (You can read more about nanocms and flat-file systems here). smiffy6969, the creator of razorCMS, encouraged me to test his CMS to see how it works, so after much procrastination, I have finally started. I have installed the very basic core of the CMS on a subdomain and called it the razorCMS Testing Pad. I’ve edited the default home page to have some custom text and set the site name and footer.
I plan to add more content, some bladepacks, and just generally see how the CMS performs in terms of speed, functionality, ease of use, and scalability. I will be posting here as I make changes to the site. Because I have a relatively hectic offline life, please be patient if updates don’t come as frequently as they should.
For some background info, downloads, and to learn more about razorCMS, please visit the razorCMS home page. You should also check out the razorCMS forums for support and more information.