kartooner

I’ve always won­dered how dif­fi­cult it would be to set up a local web server. It’s been a per­sonal project of mine con­sid­er­ing I uti­lize web tech­nolo­gies on a daily basis.

Thanks to Chad of Greasy Val­ley I found an excel­lent writeup enti­tled Set­ting up your first web server on win­dows with Apache, PHP and MySQL by Amit Arora. In plain jane lan­guage, Amit walks you through the steps of installing PHP, MySQL and Apache on a Win­dows machine. It’s like a Spar­knotes or Dum­mies guide for set­ting up web servers, clearly writ­ten for the “new­bie” but con­cise and infor­ma­tive enough for a novice user.

As I sat here read­ing through Amit’s tuto­r­ial, I felt as if the author was hold­ing my hand through the nasty bits, explain­ing in lay­mens terms what each con­fig­u­ra­tion meant. Within about 15–20 min­utes tops I had my own pri­vate Idaho (server) ready to be exper­i­mented with, and to think it only took a minor 7 or 8 steps and presto! I’m with Chad on this one — why didn’t we think of this earlier?

I plan on mir­ror­ing an exact replica of the kartooner.com web­site. This way I can exper­i­ment and tin­ker to my heart’s con­tent with­out actu­ally mess­ing up the orig­i­nal pris­tine instal­la­tion. Clearly this means improv­ing not only my web server main­te­nance skills, but also tidy­ing up my CSS and cod­ing habits, not to men­tion along the way I’ll improve and refine my PHP and MySQL knowledge.