General

When you’re developing a website, you need to see it in action on a real server, to see how it will work. While you could upload your pages to your web host every time you make a change, this quickly gets time-consuming and tiresome. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a little test server of your own? Well, the server is nothing but a piece of software so you can! Please note that, for the purposes of this article, I will assume you’re using Windows as your operating system.

Installing an IIS Test Server.

While using IIS isn’t recommended, a test server is very easy to install. All you need to do is open ‘Add or Remove Programs’ in Windows’ control panel. All you need to do is click Internet Information Services (IIS), click OK, and you’re done.

Of course, there are downsides to this. Many versions of Windows don’t come with IIS, and there’s no way to install it on them Windows XP Professional, for example, comes with IIS, but Windows XP Home does not. You might also want to consider that installing IIS on your computer will often make it less secure.

Installing an Apache Test Server.

Compared to installing IIS, installing Apache is hard Linux distributions all have relatively easy ways of doing it, but Windows wasn’t designed for it. To get Apache installed, then, you’re going to need to have a little fight with the system.

Note: If you want to skip all the following steps, you might consider using an ‘easy installer’ version of Apache, such as XAMPP (for Windows), which you can get at www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html. The downside to this approach is that you will be relying on them to provide new releases, instead of being able to update things yourself.

First of all, download Apache from http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi. Make sure you download the Windows Installer (MSI) version. You’ll find it easiest to make the server run as a service, as this will make it run automatically Apache will appear in your system tray (in the bottom-right corner of your screen).

Now, you need to find your Apache configuration file. In the folder where you installed Apache, look for another folder named ‘conf’, and then a file named ‘httpd.conf’. Open this file and look for a setting called DocumentRoot. You should change this to point to a folder on your hard drive, such as ‘c:/html’.

Now, you’ve got Apache, but that’s not usually much good on its own. The chances are that you’ll want to install PHP and MySQL as well, so here’s how:

Download PHP from http://www.php.net/downloads.php. Again, go for the installer. Once you’ve installed PHP, find its folder, and rename the php.ini-dist file there to php.ini. Find the ‘doc_root’ setting there, and set it to the same thing you set Apache’s to.

Back in Apache’s httpd.conf, you should add these lines:

LoadModule php5_module “c:/php/php5apache2.dll”
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
PHPIniDir “c:/php”

If you didn’t install PHP in c:\php, change the lines above to reflect where you put it.

Now, installing MySQL isn’t as difficult, because it runs independently of your Apache configuration. Download MySQL from dev.mysql.com/downloads. Again, get the Windows installer version. This installer has a lot of settings, but you’ll be fine if you just click Next through them to accept all the defaults.

The only remaining step is to enable MySQL support in PHP. Copy libmysql.dll file from c:\php to your Windows\System32 folder, and then open the php.ini file you created before. Remove the semicolon from the start of the line that says ‘;extension=php_mysql.dll’, and save the file.

Shut down Apache and restart it, and you’re done!

Visiting Your Server.

When they’ve installed a server on their computer, many people wonder how they can access the server they just installed as if they were visiting it over the web. The answer is simple: just open your web browser, and go to this URL: http://localhost (you can also use http://127.0.0.1). This special address means ‘the server on this computer’.

You’ll know if you installed Apache successfully because you’ll see a page congratulating you. When you change your web pages, just use your browser’s Refresh button to see the effect.

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If you want people to come to your website more than once then you need to remind them, from time to time, that you exist and give them the latest news about what’s changed and what’s been updated. One of the best ways to do this is to collect email addresses and use them to create a mailing list. But how do you collect these email addresses and how do you send out emails to so many people all at once?

Collecting the Email Addresses.

Collecting email addresses is easier than you might think. People on the web are used to typing their email addresses in a lot, and usually have an email address to use for this purpose. In most cases, if you ask for an email address as a condition of accessing something interesting sounding people won’t really mind giving it to you.

One way of doing this is to simply include a box on each page unobtrusive and not really calling attention to itself that gives your visitors the option to sign up to your newsletter. Somewhat counter-intuitively, it is often better to make mailing list sign-up entirely voluntary, as this means you will get a smaller list but it will only have the most enthusiastic people on it.

Basically, it’s a trade-off between forcing as many people as possible to sign up or just marketing to the most eager people. Your strategy should usually be decided by how many people you plan to send out emails to and what kind of response rate you seem to be getting.

What to Write in Your Mailing List Emails.

If you want people to read the emails you send to them then they can’t just be the latest dull news about your technical website features that no-one even cares about. You need to provide information and updates that are useful and relevant to the person who’s going to be opening that email.

If you just write in corporate speak and don’t say anything that’s going to be useful to real people then your email is going to be going straight into their junk mail. You should take some time over your emails. Make them something that their recipients are going to want to keep and refer to more than once often-updated, time-sensitive information is best, if you have access to it.

Apart from that, make sure to include links to the latest things on your website, as well as a few older things that are still popular. If you sell anything, you should work in a link, but don’t be too obvious about it a good way of doing things is to include a tip or two with potential uses for a certain product (making them look like they are intended for people who already own the product), sparking the reader’s curiosity enough to click through and consider buying it.

The Technical Side.

Once you’ve got a mailing list and you’ve written the first email you want to send to it, the next step is to set up the technical side of things. Just how do you think those emails are going to get sent out? Surprisingly enough, you can just use a normal email program like Outlook, if you paste all the email addresses into it. If you do this, though, you need to make sure that you use the Bcc (blind carbon copy) field for the addresses, to avoid sending out a copy of the mailing list to everyone on it.

Alternatively, there are specialist programs you can get that are devoted to bulk mail. Because spam is such a big industry, companies producing such programs tend to be shady stay away from anything that advertises itself on the basis of how many emails it can send in a minute but if you look around, you should be able to find something that meets your needs.

There are even web-based solutions that avoid you having to install any programs or send any email from your computer, avoiding the risk that you might get blacklisted somehow for sending out too many emails in too short a time. If you can find a reasonably-priced one, then they’re often the ideal solution, allowing you to manage your lists directly and send out emails easily. Make sure to do a few trial runs with smaller numbers of people before you commit yourself to anything, though.

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One of the best ways to collect information about your visitors and let them interact with your website is to register them that is, give them a password they can identify themselves with next time they visit. Unfortunately, people are sick of going through registrations, and won’t do it unless they have a very good reason to. Presenting a screen at an online shopping site that says something like ‘register now to buy your items!’ is a sure way to lose sales. So what can you do? You’ve got to be a bit more stealthy about it.

The Difference Language Makes.

It’s entirely possible to present someone with the exact same form that they would usually have to fill in, but stop it from feeling like registering by describing it differently. On your shopping site, for example, you can give the form the title ‘Payment Details’ instead of ‘Register’. Don’t ask the customer to create a password until the end of the process, and say that it’s to save their details for next time but make it optional. People like to feel like the website remembers their details to help them, not because you really want to add their details to your database.

Why is Registration Important?

Registering your users lets you remember information about them on all their subsequent visits, making it much quicker and easier for them to do whatever they do on your website it removes the barrier created by them having to type in their details over and over again. It also gives you an advantage over your competition: it’s easier to use your website, since they’re already registered with your website and they’re not with the other.

Learning from Amazon.

Amazon has an interesting way of asking people whether they want to register or log in, and it works very well. Most sites have a two-sided form, with username and password boxes and then a ‘Not Registered? Register Now!’ prompt. Amazon asks instead for the user’s email address, and then asks if they’ve shopped at Amazon before.

New customers are taken forward to enter their details, while existing ones are prompted for a password. Not only does this approach avoid calling it registration, but it also avoids making them choose a username one of the biggest sticking points. If possible, it’s always good to give users the option of logging in with either an email address or a username, in case they forget one or the other.

What is Registration, Anyway?

You’ve got to lose any fixed ideas you’ve got about how registration works, and realise that if you’ve got someone’s details and their email address, and they’ve got a password, then they’re effectively registered there’s no need to do these things all on the same form, or even all on the same day. Registration can be a gradual, step by step process: one day you’re taking their email address to send them a newsletter, the next their postal code to customise the website for their area.

It’s useful to realise that few users ever delete their cookies: your site should be able to remember them for a decent length of time without them ever needing to create a password. That gives you plenty of opportunity to only attach it to certain functions where it seems to make more sense to require one, instead of forcing the user to have a password for everything.

Streamlining the Process.

Any time someone’s filling in a form for you anyway, that’s a great time to get them registered. Let the user get as close as possible to the end of the process without having to do anything that seems like registering, and then in the very last step ask them for a password. There are dating sites, for example, that let you get as far as writing a message to a member and hitting ’send’, and only ask you to do basic registration at that point. Hopefully by then the visitor has invested enough of their time in the thing that they’re not just going to hit ‘back’ and go somewhere else.

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Thanks to the nature of open source, almost anyone can write a programming language and get a significant number of people to use it: and plenty of people have. Two of the newest and fastest-growing players when it comes to open source web languages are Python and Ruby. Neither of them were web languages originally they were normal programming languages but more and more people are starting to use them to power their websites. So what are they, and how do they work? Let’s take a look.

Python.

The Python philosophy demands that code should be simple, explicit, and readable. Where Perl wants there to be “more than one way to do it”, Python wants there to be only one way of doing each thing and it wants that way to be obvious. This makes Python code easy to work with, whether it was written by you or by someone else.

The downside to Python, though, is that it can be slow not as slow as Java, but still much slower than most languages. It is also very picky about indentation (the number of spaces or tabs at the start of each line of code), as part of its effort to make code more readable.

So does anyone use Python? It might surprise you to learn that Google uses a lot of Python code, and the popular BitTorrent file-sharing system is written in Python.

Unfortunately, when it comes to actual web programming, Python isn’t quite up to scratch in many ways: it still shows its roots as a programming language for programs instead of one for the web. It’s for this reason that Python on the web is still quite rare but they’re working on it.

Ruby.

Ruby is a relatively new programming language from Japan, and it has a lot of evangelists who simply love it. Why? Well, it lets you do complicated things quickly, easily and readably with very little code: in some ways. It’s powerful but simple. Here’s some sample code, taken from one of the best Ruby books, Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby (www.poignantguide.net):

[’toast’, ‘cheese’, ‘wine’].each { |food| print( food.capitalize ) }

What does that do? Well, first, it creates an array with the words ‘toast’, ‘cheese’, and ‘wine’. It then launches into a function, which prints out the name of each food in capital letters. All that with one line of code. It might not seem like much, but just wait until it comes time to connect to a database, retrieve records, format them the way you want and put them on the screen, all in one easy-to-read line of code.

Now, Ruby is becoming more popular on the web thanks to a web framework that makes developing websites quicker than it’s ever been: Ruby on Rails. Rails is only one year old, but it’s already got lots of support, thanks to its big feature it handles the database end of things automatically. Rails is growing at a crazy speed, because programmers love it it stops you from having to write database code over and over again, leaving you free to worry about how your web page works instead of writing SQL.

Rails works using the principle of “convention over configuration”: you do things in a standard way instead of spending time setting it up for the way you’ve decided to do things. Using Rails’ scaffolding function, you can be up and running with a simple database page within minutes then all you have left to do is build the interface.

Watch Out for Web Host Support.

One of the biggest disadvantages of using a minority programming language is that you might find trouble finding a web host that has it installed on their server. You’ll pretty much be forced to go with a smaller host: searching for ‘ruby host’ or ‘python host’ will turn up plenty of offers, but they won’t be from anyone you’ve heard of, and they’re likely to be more expensive than you’d expect. That’s the price you pay for using the latest and greatest languages.

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There’s something you have to realise about the way users interact with articles. To put it simply, they don’t just want to read them: they also want to print them out, and send them on to their friends, family and colleagues. If you can make it easier for them to do this, then your site will be a hit. But how? Well, read on.

The Print and Send Links.

At either the top or the bottom of your article, you should offer clear ‘print this article’ and ’send this article to a friend’ links. It’s up to you how you present them, but a generally good place is underneath the byline and date, like this:

Article Headline
by Bob Smith
January 1, 2010
Print this article
Send this article to a friend

If that looks messy, though, try moving the links to the end of the article. You might even link to have the ‘print’ link at the top of the page and the send to a friend link at the bottom.

You should also note that there are standard ‘icons’ (small pictures) to represent printing and sending. Printing is a picture of a printer (the same one used in word processors), while sending is a picture of an envelope. Using these icons will make it much easier for people to see what the different functions of your website are. In many cases, you can even leave out the text and just have the icons, or only have the text appear when the user hovers over the icons this saves on space without sacrificing usability.

CSS for Printing.

It’s an unfortunate fact of the web that many web pages look simply terrible if you print them as they are. No-one wants ads on their print-outs, or blue-underlined links, or navigation, or many of the other elements of a web page. For your visitors who want to print, then, it’s good to be able to remove these things from your page when they press that ‘print’ button, before you tell the browser to start printing.

How can you do this easily? Well, luckily, CSS has a built-in mechanism for it. It lets you specify different styles depending on media, with the default being media:screen for printing, you can use media:print, and add or take away different parts of the style quickly and easily.

It’s not difficult to switch between the screen and print CSS stylesheets when that print button is pressed all you need to do is add a second stylesheet underneath your first one. That means that your stylesheet declaration (in your HTML head) needs to look like this:

The mystyle-print.css contains all the CSS that will be applied to the document when it prints: nothing from mystyle.css will be applied. Browsers should then apply this stylesheet automatically when your document is printed all that remains is to link to javascript:self.print() for your ‘print this page’ link.

Sending Pages.

The best way to handle the sending of pages is to provide three input boxes for the person doing the sending: one asking for their name or email address, one asking for the recipient’s email address, and an extra box for any customised message you might want to send.

All you need to do then is create an email from this information: in PHP, for example, this is as simple as using the mail() function. Include the information entered by the sender in the message’s ‘from’ field, instead of the name of your website, and keep your own words to a minimum if the sender wrote a custom message: it’s much better for a message to look like this:

Thought you might like this! http://www.example.com/article/101

than like this:

You’ve been sent an article from example.com! The sender said: “Thought you might like this!” http://www.example.com/article/101

Basically, emphasise the fact that it’s from their friend, not from your website, and you’ll get far more people clicking the link. It’s also worth including the title and even the intro, as well as just a link to the article, so the person involved is more tempted to click it after all, if their friend thought they’d be interested, they probably will be.

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If you have products to sell, then your number one reason for starting a website is likely to be promoting them. Have you considered, though, that you could sell your products directly, online? This is e-commerce basically like a much better version of mail order, where the descriptions can be any length and your customers can communicate with you as much as they like before they buy. To start up an e-commerce ‘web shop’, however, you need to take a look at e-commerce software.

The Free and the Expensive.

E-commerce software, more than any other kind of web software, varies massively in price. There are e-commerce solutions out there that cost thousands of dollars, but at the same time there is open source software like osCommerce that you can download for nothing. What’s the difference? In my experience, very little.

If you want to make a good profit from your website, then, you should really be looking at the free e-commerce solutions, or alternatively writing your own. It’s madness to pay thousands for e-commerce software when you can get software custom-built for your website for a few hundred or, of course, for free, if you’re a programmer yourself.

Integration and Templates.

One of the most important things about an e-commerce shop is that it shouldn’t appear separate from the rest of your website: you should make sure to keep its design consistent with your site’s overall look and feel. In most e-commerce software, the way to change the design is with templates: you should look into how difficult it will be to turn your site’s design into a template, or get a template version of it made for you. In some cases, you might even find it easier to come up with a whole system of your own instead of producing templates, if you have a lot of unique information about your products that you want customers to be able to see.

Hosted Solutions.

The idea of going to all that trouble and setting up e-commerce on their site only to make a grand total of zero sales is what puts a lot of people off. In this case, you might appreciate hosted solutions such as Yahoo Stores (smallbusiness.yahoo.com) that offer you a ready-made e-commerce store to drop your products into and link to from your website. The monthly fees and setup fees can be a little high, but it at least gives you an opportunity to dip your toe in the water without getting too burned if it all goes wrong. If you really want to try things on the cheap, take a look at eBay Stores (stores.ebay.com), which lets you list products for roughly the same price as listing them in eBay’s auctions section.

Things to Do and Avoid.

When you’re opening an e-commerce store, there are some things that you should always remember to do, and some things that you really shouldn’t do. Here’s a little advice.

Describe products well. You’re not limited by space here: put in every detail that you can think of about every product you sell. If you don’t take the time to put in all the information you can get your hands on, don’t be surprised when nothing sells.

Make searches work. Any e-commerce site needs to be easily searchable at an absolute minimum, someone should be able to type in the name of any product and have the product’s page appear. You should never, ever say ‘no results found’: display a selection of your most popular items instead, with a message saying “we couldn’t find that item… maybe you were looking for one of these?”

Sort results by most popular first (that is, best selling first). Whatever you do, don’t sort by price unless the customer asks for it: sorting by lowest price first makes your customers look at the cheapest items before the rest, while highest price first make you look like you’re trying to fleece them.

Have pictures. It’s commercial suicide not to attach a picture to every single item description, and preferably more than one. Make them small, but make sure users can click them to display a bigger version, if they want to this saves on both screen space and bandwidth.

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Here’s a question: how can you make your website wildly popular overnight? The answer to the question is ‘offer free downloads’. Everyone loves to get something for nothing, and downloading is as old as the Internet itself but it never declines in popularity.

Screensavers and Wallpapers.

Wallpaper is an ideal thing to offer as a download: it’s popular, replaced often, and doesn’t need you to host prohibitively large files. Unfortunately, the most popular kinds of wallpaper show characters and images that you’re unlikely to be able to get a license to use, but, luckily, you can still create good wallpaper using nothing but geometric shapes and interesting colours.

Any artist worth their salt should be able to fire up Photoshop and produce quite a few very appealing wallpaper-sized images for very little money: it’s just not that difficult, if you know what you’re doing. However, you do need to remember that you’ll have to offer each wallpaper in different sizes for different screen resolutions (so one for 800×600, one for 1024×768, and so on), which can be troublesome. Wallpaper should generally be one part of a site rather than the only thing the site does.

The same thing goes for screensavers. Screensavers are harder to produce than wallpapers, but they have the advantage that the user is likely to spend longer looking at them. If you get an artist to create them using Flash, you should have a relatively easy time. Don’t be tempted, though, to have screensavers made that simply consist of the same animation looped over and over again.

What makes a good screensaver, then? The answer is that it should be either useful or interesting, and it must be one of these things for longer than five minutes. An ideal screensaver is one that provides useful information from your website that a user is likely to need every day but, if you’re just going for interesting, you can do something as simple as using randomisation and mathematical equations to produce different patterns every time the screensaver is started. For some ideas, take a look at the screensavers that come with Windows.

Demos and Trailers.

Demos of software and games and trailers for films are very popular items on the web, with literally millions of people searching for the latest ones every day. Even better, because they essentially serve as marketing for the companies that produce them, they’re typically freely redistributable by anyone who has the bandwidth and the inclination.

In that case, why isn’t everyone offering demos and trailers to their visitors? The answer is bandwidth costs. An average trailer or demo can be anywhere from ten megabytes to about fifty multiply that by thousands of visitors per day, and then see how many gigabytes of transfer you’d need per month. It adds up fast.

How can you solve this problem? Well, you can try to pay for the bandwidth using advertising, but you’re unlikely to make a profit that way, unless you bombard the viewer with ads to the point where they’ll just want to escape. Realistically, the only way to make a profit on high-bandwidth items is to use the queue ruse: that is, force people who want to download to wait in a queue for a set length of time, and offer them a button that lets them jump the queue for a relatively small amount of money. You’d be surprised just how many people will click that button the cost of a gigabyte of bandwidth will easily repay itself five times over. Many gaming sites sell monthly subscriptions that get visitors nothing more than downloads of demos, and they do well out of it.

The queue approach will, however, have the effect of reducing your site’s popularity, as many people will just leave instead of waiting or paying. This is the paradox of free downloads: offering them out there completely for free will get you thousands upon thousands of visitors, but you’ll be losing money on it because of the bandwidth costs. I’ll leave this as a problem for you to solve, but I would suggest that you could do well out of it if you had a related business of your own to advertise, instead of just taking a cut of external advertisers’ profits.

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There are few more important factors in your website’s success than the people who link to it. But why are links so important, and how can you get more people to link to you?

Built on Links.

The early web was built on links: if people wanted to go to websites other than the ones whose addresses they knew by heart, the only way they had of getting there was to follow links. Eventually, whole directories of links started to be built, like the early Yahoo directory. These acted as the gateways to the web.

Rapidly, though, this reliance on links started to be replaced by a reliance on search. Instead of first going to a link directory, users started using search engines that made it easier to find what they were looking for. They would still follow links at the sites they got to, but it didn’t take them long to click ‘home’ and get back to the search engine to start all over again. This created a web where links gradually seemed to matter less and less, and the big directories were forced to turn themselves into search engines.

The Rise of PageRank.

What Google did when it invented PageRank was to take the search engine and make it pay attention to links. Old search engines relied heavily on unreliable and easily-gamed measures like meta tags and keyword density. PageRank added link popularity into the mix, meaning that your website’s ranking would now be influenced by the number of links pointing to it.

What effect did this have? Effectively, it significantly changed the way the web works: instead of users having to choose between searching the web or following links, they now have search engines that follow links for them and try to decide which ones are the most suitable. As you can imagine, this was a big step forward.

What Does That Mean for Me?

Basically, it means that you have to be concerned with how many websites link to you, as it will influence your ranking in the search engines. It also means that you should be careful about who you link to, and that once you have a high ranking, you might even be able to sell sponsored links to people who are trying to raise their search engine ranking.

Of course, you shouldn’t ignore the more traditional uses of links either: a link from a popular site is likely to directly send plenty of traffic your way. You’ve got to take care not to change around your URL system without adding useful redirects, otherwise you’ll break people’s links and waste this traffic, not to mention making people more reluctant to link to you in the future.

How Do I Get People to Link to My Website?

That’s the big question on the modern web, and there are plenty of people out there ready to try and sell you dodgy answers. You should beware of methods like sending your URL out to thousands of sites at random with a message saying “I’ll link to you if you link to me”. Every webmaster gets dozens of those every day, and they’re really nothing more than spam.

The best way, instead, is to use a human touch. Become involved with forums and other groups to do with your topic, and talk to people with similar websites to yours. Basically, make friends, real friends, and be willing to link to their websites. As long as you’re nice about it, the chances are that they’ll do the same for you the best way to do it is not to ask at all, so that it looks like you only linked to their site because you thought it was so great.

Do remember, though, that all links aren’t equal, either in terms of traffic or search engine ranking. A link from a highly-ranked site will improve your rankings much more than one from a less well-ranked site. It’s still good to get as many links as you can, but don’t spend a disproportionate amount of time and effort on the less important ones concentrate on getting your site its big break, getting it linked from a really big, popular site.

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You may have heard of a server system called LAMP, and wondered what it is. Well, the answer is that LAMP isn’t any one thing on its own it’s actually a combination of four technologies. Together, the LAMP technologies form the most popular overall server system on the web today.

Which technologies are they? The answer lies in the name. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP. The term originated as a marketing word to help point out that open source (free) software, when combined, could be just as effective as expensive ‘enterprise solutions’ like J2EE (Java) or Microsoft’s .NET. To understand the system, let’s take a look at the components individually.

Linux.

Linux is widely considered to be the open source operating system of choice, and the main alternative to Microsoft Windows. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work on Linux and create programs for it. At its heart, the system is more-or-less a Unix derivative, which means that it’s very stable and fast. While widespread adoption of Linux for the desktop seems far off, mainly because of the difficulty of getting people to switch, it isn’t stopping Linux from doing very well on web servers.

There are many different varieties of Linux, known as ‘distributions’, with each one focusing on different features. Some popular distributions include Debian (www.debian.org), SuSE (owned by Novell, www.novell.com/linux/suse) and Red Hat (free version at fedora.redhat.com). If you’re thinking of trying out Linux on your own computer, you might like to look at Ubuntu (www.ubuntulinux.org), which is a less technical and relatively easy to use distribution.

Apache.

Apache is the world’s most popular web server bar none. It was based on the second-ever web server, which was developed at the NCSA, and its history goes back as far as 1995.

For all intents and purposes, Apache has become the industry standard server: it would be silly to say that Apache isn’t suitable for business use, considering that it is included in enterprise packages like Oracle and IBM’s WebSphere. Apache is developed by the non-profit Apache Foundation (www.apache.org).

MySQL.

MySQL is a relational database, popular because of its relative simplicity and the fact that it’s free. It is considered to be much easier to set up and use than more ‘traditional’ database software, and MySQL databases can be managed using a range of graphical software. MySQL is controversial among database professionals, however, as its developers haven’t included many complicated advanced features, feeling that they would make the software too difficult to use without making it any more useful. MySQL is developed by a Swedish company, MySQL AB, and its website is www.mysql.com.

Perl and PHP.

Perl and PHP are both scripting languages, and they are both often used as the ‘glue’ that makes a database-driven website do what it should. However, the two languages, are very different: Perl is powerful but hard to read, while PHP is simpler but more limited. Choosing between them is largely a matter of preference, which is why they’re both included in the system some people also include a third P, Python, as an alternative language.

If you’re starting out, it’s probably best to use PHP the official site at php.net has good tutorials and references on the language. Perl’s site is at perl.org, but you should only really start with Perl if you’ve got some previous programming experie
Getting LAMP.

If you want to get the whole LAMP system together instead of downloading the components separately, a good place to go is www.apachefriends.org/en. They offer it for download don’t worry, all the software is free. You don’t get Linux, but you get everything else, and it will install easily on most operating systems, including Linux and Windows.

LAMP Variants.

There are a number of LAMP variants that replace parts of the system. While these systems aren’t as popular, they’re still worth knowing about and considering.

WAMP: Windows replaces Linux.
MAMP: Mac OS replaces Linux.
AMP: Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP running on any operating system.
LAPP: PostgreSQL replaces MySQL.
LAMJ: JSP replaces Perl/PHP.

There is also the insulting-sounding term WIMP, which means that Windows replaces Linux and IIS replaces Apache this is considered to result in a much worse system than LAMP.

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