Have you ever thought about what goes into creating a website or heck, even a singe page? Well, you’ve found The Nerd Garden, so you know what a cool site looks like! Have you thought of trying the web page thing out for yourself to see what’s involved?
But What If I Screw It Up?
That’s the fear most people have. But, did you know, there’s a quick, easy, and free way to get an entire full featured web environment set up right on your PC or MAC? No extra equipment needed. That’s right.
You can create your own website before you:
- Decide on a website name
- Decide on a site design
- Decide on a hosting service
Which means it will cost you nothing to see if you have the chops to jump into the web game. Plus, you aren’t playing with a real site, so there’s nothing to break.
So How Do I Do This Awesome Thing?
One word. XAMPP. Yes, I apologize in advance. XAMPP is another one of those acronyms that computer geeks like me love to use. It stands for Apache + MariaDB + PHP + Perl.
Lets break it down
- Apache is the most popular web server used on the Internet.
- MariaDB (a fork of MySQL) is a very popular database solution.
- PHP is a scripting language. There is a lot of popular web software written with PHP. WordPress is one of the most popular.
- Perl is another scripting language in which popular in web development.
Why Should I Try It?
Aside from the fact that it’s free and you can’t break anything, here’s what led me to it. I first used XAMPP years ago as a way to work on a website I was developing in PHP. At the time, I didn’t always have access to the Internet. XAMPP can be used offline on your local machine.
I’ve used XAMPP for a long while but just revisited it and found that it is easier than ever to set up and use. They even have modules that have WordPress and other tools already set up on them.
I’ve also used it as a way to test changes to my website before making those change to the live site. Okay, here’s my word of caution for the day:
You never. ever want to change your live site without testing it first.
Steph would never let me hear the end of it if I broke The Nerd Garden. There are XAMPP modules available for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and many other content management solutions.
Are you give this a try? Download the Down-low and use our quick reference guide to setup XAMPP on your PC!
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