To edit the httpd.conf I needed to do the following:

1. start Terminal by going to Utilities/Terminal
2. type the following into the terminal:

sudo emacs /etc/http/httpd.conf

3. enter in your admin password
4. Inside emacs, uncomment the line

#LoadModule php4_module

to read:
LoadModule php4_module

and change:
# AddModule mod_php4.c

to read:
AddModule mod_php4.c

Then add the following in the AddType section:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

5. Save and exit from emacs
CTRL + x, CTRL +s = saves changes use the following keyboard combination
CTRL + x, CTRL +c = exit

6. I created a phpinfo() script using the freeware Taco editor.

7. Want to install MySQL on OS X too? I’ll leave that one for readers (or come back and update this entry or add a new one).

8. I chose to download the MySQL 4.1 binary here. Once downloaded open the package and double click the appropriate package. I chose mysql-max-4.1.18-apple-darwin8.2.0-powerpc.pkg. It will vary based on what type of Mac you have.

9. After install I chose to startup the database manually using the Terminal shell commands:

10. Next, I added an alias for MySQL using bash so I could type “mysql” to get into the databases and “mysqladmin” to use the admin without having to CD to the full path

alias mysql=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql
alias mysqladmin=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin

11. Voila — in! Now time to secure the MySQL database and enter in a root password

mysqladmin -u root password PASSWORD_HERE

Just change PASSWORD_HERE to the root password you want to use.

MyTop creator Jeremy Zawodny writes:

Someone has built and AJAX powered version of mytop, the little console based MySQL monitoring tool I wrote years ago. I guess it’s now buzzword compliant.

mytop is a handy little program for monitoring MySQL queries that we’ve used in the past on a couple of our boxes so I decided to fire up this AJAX version and see how it fared. AjaxMyTop received 3.7 out of 5 rating at Ajaxian as of this writing.

Installation started at 8:38am PST. gunzip ajaxMyTop.tar.gz. tar -xvf ajaxMyTop.tar. Threw dom errors right away, documentation is non-existent. Error was result of PHP 5.x required for the program. Turns out Michael Kimsal hacked up processlist.php to work in PHP4. Here is the PHP 4 process.php source file you’ll need if you aren’t running PHP5. And no, I didn’t clean up the indenting. Total time spent on this project: 20 minutes.

These are how-to tutorials to give step by step instructions for installing, setting up, and configuring Apache2 web server, ActivePerl, PHP, and MySQL in Windows. A section is also included that tells you how to make your server accessible to the world, some info on firewalls, and a section on other types of servers (ftp, mail).

Another Windows XP / 2000 local installation tutorial was mentioned last month.

My personal and professional preference is to use a web host. Here’s a few reasons why:

- can develop for the target server environment where programs will run
- I use Windows primarily (yes, I use Linux and Mac too) for desktop and Linux servers so code running locally would need to be further modified

With plans at places like 1and1.com (affiliate) costing as low as $2.95 a month and including PHP (3, 4 and 5) and a MySQL database, a developer doesn’t need to look at setting up a local developer environment.

I’ll have more to say about 1and1.com in a future post as we use them for a few sites and I’ve been pleasantly surprised from a webmaster and developer perspective. More on that later.

Steps for setting up a new Wordpress (WP) blog:

1. Database created? Create a MySQL database for the domain.

Note: If you have more than one WP blog installed in the same database then open up wp-config.php and change the ‘wp_’ to something else like ‘wp2_’ so that you can run multiple wordpress blogs in the same database.

2. Edit wp-config.php with the database information. Create a subdirectory in the WP version locally so you can backup the wp-config locally there.
3. FTP all WP files to the target domain, including the customized wp-config.php file in step #2.
4. Run the install file from your browser. Default install location is:

domain.com/wp-admin/install.php

5. Record the admin username and password somewhere safe.
6. Delete the install files: install.php, install-helper.php
7. Create a primary user: Users -> Authors & Users -> Add New User
8. Promote this user to Level 9 (which is one level beneath the Admin level of 10).
9. Add whatever plugins you want to use. Here’s some you might try:

bad behavior - shut down the spambots
codesnippet - allows you to include code snippets inside posts
dashboard options - add PHP code snippets, RSS feeds and more to your dashboard
follow - removes the rel=nofollow links from comments
wp-cache 2.0 - cache pages to speed up loading
page navigation - adds page spanning 1,2,3… to WP pages
WP-Dash - replace the default admin area

10. Clean up the default Links area, adding/removing any default links.
11. Delete the test post and make a first test placeholder post. Something like “Hello World” but by this new user.
12. Choose a template or design your own. Starting with the default template might be helpful. There are detailed instructions at the WP codex for how to make custom WP templates.
13. Start posting!

This post will be updated over time as I’m using this for my own reference too, so might want to bookmark this one.

Based on John Gruber’s Markdown (Perl), PHP Markdown can be used a Wordpress plugin by copying over the markdown.php file from the zip file to the wp-content/plugins directory. There is an official demo called Dingus here. The screenshot above shows my example of using PHP Markdown syntax through Dingus.

The function Markdown($text) inside markdown.php is passed a text string and returns the marked down version, so incorporating this into another program where you want to markdownify the text is pretty straightforward, although the file is a bit on the bulky side at 55k. Would be more convenient if a version without Wordpress and bBlog code inside it were provided in the zip package. The most recent version as of this writing was September 5, 2005.

This is a quick guide to install and configure the Apache web-server with PHP and JSP support on a Windows XP Pro SP2 machine. I also included PHPMyAdmin, MyODBC, and WordPress.

Looks like this might come in handy as a reference.

BTW, fellow coders, you can find several of us down at irc.scriptschool.com #scriptschool throughout the week. Feel free to stop on by and say hello :)

The Search Reloaded Wordpress Plugin by Denis at semiologic seeks to improve upon the built-in WP search.

To use just download, unzip, and FTP to the wp-content/plugins directory. Then go into the admin area and activate the plugin.

If you want to adjust the look of the search results you’ll need to edit:

This function is at the end of the included sem-search-reloaded.php file and contains code that looks very similar to what is in the default template search.php file.

In the example pictured above, we also used a slightly modified version of GaMerZ Page Navigation plugin. This plugin is useful for spanning page, category and search results.

This might require root or sudo privileges. In that case the command would be:

On a PHP note, I broke down ways to work with the PHP date() function in my php-scripts diary on 12/17/1999. It doesn’t seem like that long ago, but it was nearly six years ago!

Success! - If cURL exists and is enabled it should return something that looks like this:

PHP version 4 example successful result:

PHP version 5.1 example successful result (returns an array)

Failure — if it doesn’t exist you’ll see an error message like this:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: curl_version() in /path/to/sites/tdavid/php/examples/curl_version.php on line 5

In this case if you have the right access permissions (usually this is root access) you can edit the php.ini file. Here is instructions on how to locate the php.ini file.

You can edit the php.ini on Linux via ssh.

The section of the php.ini that refers to cURL is located in the Windows Extensions section, pictured above.

Tired of black and whit coding that looks like what’s above? Want to colorize it to look like this instead:

Here is how to make colorized pretty source code using the .htacess method for .phps files:

Step 1. create a text file and save it as .htaccess. Put the following code in the file:

Step 2. change the filename to .phps from .php
Step 3. navigate with your browser to the .phps and voila!

The nice thing about the htacess method is it works with PHP version 3 files, whereas the two function methods only work with version 4.xx and 5.xx. But who is running PHP version 3 any more? Anybody?

Other ways to highlight PHP source code
If you can’t or don’t want to use the htaccess method for some reason then there are a couple PHP functions that will colorize code called: highlight_string() (PHP 4, 5 only) and highlight_file() (PHP 4, 5 only)