Brown PHP

Welcome to BrownPHP! If this is the first time you have been visiting the site, please make yourself welcome. I made a quick video to go through some of the features of the site like the BrownPHP code repository and the book review section. Check the video out and let me know what you think.

This is the first screencast that I did and it was done in a very short amount of time. I’m just playing with the idea of making more screencasts in the future to possibly run through code an other things like that.

Like I said, this screencast is the first I tried. I’ll most likely redo this in the future so that it is a little more professional, and possibly without all that uh – um, haha. Let me know if there is anything that you would like to see a screencast about in the future.

I’m going to start doing some reorganizing of the site as you may have already noticed via the new site design. One thing that I would like to do at first is create a code repository.

As I’m building websites I’ve started to build a library of classes. Most of the classes I normally create and would like to share involve integration with Twitter, eBay, Amazon and others. The goal really is to make it easier on PHP coders starting out to implement some of these wonderful services into project of their very own without having to review API documentation for hours. Most of which is poorly written…

So I’ll obviously be adding a Twitter Class into the repository first. Then as time goes on, others will follow. Give me some time to go through the classes and document them properly so that developers don’t need to decipher my code. J

You can get to the BrownPHP Code Repository here or simply click the “Code” link in the top banner of the site. Let me know if there are any classes in particular that you would like me to add to the repository as priority. Most likely I already have a class for whatever you are looking for, just let me know.

If you are as involved and excited about PHP development as I am and want to help new PHP developers out there, please let them know about BrownPHP.com. I would be more than happy to plug any of the projects that you may be working on.

Boy oh boy has it been a long time since I last posted. I don’t have any excuses other than saying that I have been busy… My wife and I recently purchased a new home closer to my day job and painting/decorating has been time consuming to say the least.

Enough excuses.

If you own your own website, do you host it yourself? Does a third party host it for you? If your reading this, I think I can assume that you understand the advantages and disadvantages of the two options. I have made a few websites that run on a local networks, and I have setup the servers to handle this. I have created and maintained many external websites visible to Google and have hired many web hosting companies to serve these sites. However, I have never made an external website that is hosted from my own server.

Brownphp.com is currently being hosted with web hosting company, Dreamhost. I haven’t had a problem with them at all, but I have just had this desire to host my sites from my own home computer. I soon will be building a new server for the home, which will have more than enough horsepower to handle the sites. I also have a healthy supply of bandwidth through Comcast so I don’t believe that would be a potential bottle neck.

My only concerns are that I have no experience hosting a website from my home machine rather than a third party. Having no experience with this leaves me feeling a little unprepared in regards to what I am getting myself into.

One of my main questions is pointing Brownphp.com at my home computer. I already have my router set up to allow my home web server to be accessed remotely via punching in the home IP address. I just don’t know how to map the url to my home IP. Another potential problem is that I don’t have a static IP address. Are there any services that would help me get around this?

Why am I doing this when everything is already running fine? Because I want to learn how to do it. I am very experienced with PHP, MySQL and many other web languages/databases, but I don’t know how to host an external website from my own server. I could read every book in the world explaining how to do it, but if I don’t go down the rocky path and setup my own web server, I’ll never retain any of that information.

I was hoping that if any of you have had experience doing this, your knowledge would be greatly appreciated. Please comment with informative links, advice, warnings, etc. I would also like to continually update this post on my progress to help other programmers/tinkerers understand how to do this to eventually be a guide for others.

This is officially the first post of many to come.  I have never really had the chance to start a WordPress blog before.  Well, maybe mentioning that I never really had the time to work on one would be better.  I always enjoyed building a site from the ground up.  Starting to think about how I will design the file structure, and what design pattern to choose from always get me excited.  I don’t think I need to mention the gratification you get from launching a site that you have been working on for months to the public eye.

So I am admittedly late to the WordPress blog show, but I am doing this to contribute everything that I have learned along the way about PHP and other web technologies to the PHP community.  My motivation behind continued work on this site comes from all the developers out there that have offered advice or have troubleshooted my PHP design mistakes in the past.  I hope that I can use this site as a conduit to other PHP developers to share ideas that we can all learn and grow from.

I am currently in a living situation that cuts me out of the loop from the Web 2.0 world.  I live in Indiana/Ohio and believe it or not, the only way I can hear about or learn more about PHP is from blogs, and php.net.  I’m sure I am not the only person in this situation.  Some day, I do plan on moving the West Coast or New York, where I can be around more like-minded people.

I just wanted to use this first post on Brown PHP to welcome you and hope you stick around to contribute and learn more about the great things that PHP can do to make the world a better place!