Enough playing around with the Ubuntu installation – I have to fix up a website.

PHP has been great for coding up web apps and even general website stuff. Debugging has been a bit wanky, though – up to now, my methodology has been to include a ‘debug’ class, sprinkle a few statements around (glorified print statements), and then remove them when it’s done. By removing the easily identifiable debug include (do a global search on the .php files), the various debug statements come up unresolved and I can insure they don’t dangle around in the production site.

Honestly, since there’s no heavy compilation step, doing this sort of thing in PHP is blindingly fast – make an edit, refresh the page, and you see the change, instantly.

But, you have to modify the code – sometimes extensively to get down to the problem – and then you have to re-modify it back to where it was minus the bug, once you have the fix.  It’s also a bit tough to do hidden form-response pages, and the like.

A real debugging environment would eliminate those issues.

Zend IDE

So, I popped for the Zend Pro IDE — the pro version supports remote debugging (which I think is essential vs. local. Pages may or may not behave correctly in a local installation, especially on Windows (where the IDE has to reside.) That’s why I put up a developer server – it’s a very close mirror of the production server. Thus, I want to debug on the development server.)

Obviously I use IDE’s for other development environments, but the fact is the edit and turnaround cycle for PHP has been so fast, I’ve put it off, for a long time. Now that I’ve decided to bite off the effort and cost, I’m finding it’s a bit of a hassle to set up, especially for virtual hosts.

Hopefully, it will be worth the effort and cost, once it’s up.

So, there I was – happily using the Google Blogger to keep things on my site, and keep me from having to install yet another piece of software on my server. It was all working fine, until Google’s Blogger facility to host the pages here (to drive the search engines) broke.

And, gathering from comments from others who were experiencing the same problem, Google did not appear to be inclined to fix it – at least not anytime soon.

What’s a diehard techie with a penchant for wordsmithing to do?

Install my own, of course. Thus, a subsequent installation of WordPress to this site, importing the Blogger version into it via the .rss feed, a bit of server redirection to go from the old file-based to the new database-based format (and new sub-domain to serve it), and lo and off – we’re running again with a self hosted blogging system.

Of course, I need to activate the .rss feed stuff, activate tags, get the keywords right, and do something about this theme…

It never ends.

Update: 16-Oct

Voila!

WordPress is up and running, blogs are transported over, a reasonable theme is selected, and overall, things look pretty reasonable. This is the ‘mu’ (multi-user) version of WordPress – I chose it in the event I want to put other blogs up for various domains on the server (I have several.) It’s a bit wanky, but I can make it do what I want.

Only issue left is the pic – it’s a bit scruffy looking. have to clean that up, a bit.

Onward…

Update II: 18-Oct

Chose a different them – no picture issue, after all. I like this one, a lot. It still took some tweaking, but it’s a nice, semi-formal techie look. And there’s room on the side for something or other…

rickb