WhoWhatWeb

A List Apart normally publishes excellent articles about the technical side of web design, but they’ve been branching out a bit lately. The latest post, Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Website for No Reason), addresses one of the most important principles on the business side of initiating a web design project — knowing why you’re doing it in the first place.

Starting a web project without clearly knowing and communicating its purpose is a good way to waste a lot of time and money. This article gives some quick and easy ideas on creating a written objective and a statement of strategy. The piece is not detailed or comprehensive, but it should get you thinking in the right direction.

I upgraded my Debian sarge web server to PHP 5.05 and MySQL 4.1 last night.

Not really very difficult. I followed some procedures in my “Upgrading to PHP5” book, but most of the tricky stuff was taken care of for me by the Debian packages. The PHP 5 package was a backport I got at www.dotdeb.org, since Debian doesn’t have it in either stable or testing. (If anyone wants to see details, let me know.)

All of my stuff just worked afterwards. Of course, I only have four domains and a handful of packages, so testing was relatively easy. I had thought about installing PHP 5 as a CGI for testing purposes, but then decided just to go for the gusto and replace the old version.

For complex sites the more cautious approach would probably be a good idea. There are some tricky incompatibilities between MySQL client and server versions that must be worked around, and there are a few OO things in PHP4 scripts that might break under PHP5.

Now I can start playing with all the stuff I’m reading about in “PHP5 Objects, Patterns and Practice.” It’s a *very* good book so far, and the OO concepts are starting to come together for me.