Displaying All Build Your Own Blog Blogs

Welcome to the Build Your Own Blog (BYOB) blog. These entries describe the process I went through to create this website and how some of the features have been created. This website is created and hosted on a server that sits in my house, rather than utilizing one of the web hosting services, so articles will cover setting up your own webserver as well as the content components.

These blogs will not necessarily walk through all the technical details as there are much better reference sites elsewhere on the web. Links will be included to these reference sites where applicable. The focus here will be to add commentary or describe why certain choices have been made. And most importantly, to add a little humor where possible.

So, how did it all begin? Rather than how, more of a "why did it all begin?" Originally from the UK, I got a job offer in a land far, far away (the good old US of A) which I decided to accept. Nothing strange until you get to the bit about the girlfriend deciding to relocate as well. (Not strange that a girlfriend would want to move to the US, strange that someone into computers and Star Trek has a girlfriend).

Anyway, job in the US --> Girlfriend comes to US --> Get married --> Have baby --> Need to share photos with the grandparents back in the UK.

So why not use one of the many websites that allow you to share photos? First, they make it difficult to transfer files in bulk – you can download one at a time, but you can’t leave the computer downloading a large zip file. Second, it would be too easy.

Third, and probably the most important reason, I was zoning out one Sunday afternoon watching the cars go round and round whilst surfing the web. Ended up on Ebay and started bidding on stuff. Found a computer that was mis-listed and going cheap, bid on it and won. Therefore have a spare PC that needed a project in order to justify the purchase.

All makes sense really when you think about it.

There’s an advert on TV in the States that has a pre-teen girl talking to her mother in "text message" speech. Complete with subtitles for those of us that don’t understand abbreviations like OMG or TISNF. I guess I’m the older generation now as I obviously need subtitles. Far be it from me to understand these abbreviations, I mean … WTF.

Any of you remember those old jokes when computers first came out about homosexual command line prompts – C:Enter I prefer the American version (utilizing the fact that this "#" is the pound symbol rather than the hash symbol) – C:Enter:###

What’s all this got to do with this blog then? Bugger all really – thought I’d sidetrack a little. I ended up on some site somewhere during this project that talked about how to write the best blogs. Really, all it said was to include photos to make it more interesting. My guess is that article was written by a pre-teen that had far more interesting things to write about than putting together a webserver and blog site. But, not wanting to debunk the idea before I’ve tried it, please find a photo of my Ebay purchase. And, through the wizardry of some javascript, if you double click on the image in this blog, the picture will open up in a larger window so you can see the details more clearly. Go on, give it a try ……


…….there, where else can you have so much fun?

Yes, we’re onto the setup. Rather than bore you with all the details, here’s where we take advantage of other resources. DSLWebserver has pretty much everything you need to know about setting up your own webserver. Instead, we’ll look at some of the choices made.

I guess the first decision is which webserver software to use. There’s plenty to choose from, but by far the most common are Microsoft’s IIS and Apache. Well, my Ebay box came with W2K pro on it, so it makes sense to use IIS right? Well, not so fast. There are plenty of limitations with IIS unless you pay for the server license (only 10 concurrent logons) which may cause problems. Again, use your favorite search engine to look for IIS versus Apache if you want to read more articles about the difference.

It wasn’t these differences that made me choose Apache. I spent hours trying to find IIS to install it. IIS is free with your operating system – all you have to do is stick in your system disk and load it as an optional extra. Ah! That would be the problem. This is an OEM machine that comes with the software bundled, so there is no disk to stick in and install from. Surely then you just need to download it from Microsoft’s website. Hmmm, not quite. The website just tells you to stick the disk in and install from there.

Being a product of the Microsoft generation, it made me nervous to try something different. Going out the comfort zone, but if Microsoft aren’t going to make their product available then we have to look elsewhere. Nothing ventured, nothing gained – so I installed Apache.

(True story – many years ago [pre 9/11 I hasten to add] a group of us were traveling through an airport with shotguns that need to be declared at customs. The airport in question was small and a couple of the guys missed the “red channel” and walked through. When confronted by the customs official with "didn’t you see the arrows?" They responded with “Arrows? I didn’t even see the Indians!” Needless to say the customs officials were not amused and we all got to stay longer than expected in the airport whilst the entire group of 20 had their luggage searched with a fine tooth comb).

But then again …. Well, that’s a maybe, but I have no regrets over using Apache or any of the software available under General Public License. I will include a list later of all the software that I’ve used. For the time being, suffice it to say that the total cost is $0.

The only thing I would do different if starting again would be to strip the Windows operating system and stick Linux on. Maybe this will be a project for the future. (And this from someone who has been force-fed Microsoft. I even have an xBox and an xBox 360).

This blog probably belongs later on, however, it’s something I wished I knew earlier in the project so I’ve included it here. Did you know that all web documents are supposed to conform to certain standards? Well, I didn’t. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have created various standards for documents to conform to releases of HTML or XHTML. Kind of weird, but finding this out after creating a number of pages confused me as it seemed to be telling me that I need to state what document I had created. The pages I created worked in that they load into the browsers and display pretty much what I want, so why bother? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Maybe, but if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

Excuse me while I ramble off into a war of sayings. Truth is, the standards are there for a reason – to ensure that the instructions are interpreted correctly. Also, they’re used by the search engines to a certain extent, so you benefit by following the standard.

W3C offers tools that can be used to test the validity of the webpages you’ve created. Something that is well worth taking advantage of.

The one thing that confuses me though is whether or not W3C is the correct acronym. I know that when you multiply something out it doesn’t matter which order the components are in, but following the logic of Y2K it would seem to me that W3C = WCCC rather than WWWC. Maybe Worcestershire Country Cricket Club have started defining standards for the Internet.

On another ramble and back to the title, did you see the episode where Xena and Gabrielle kissed? One of TV’s greatest moments I feel.

Probably the only useful thing I’m going to write in this entire blog. There is some bug between Windows 2000 and Apache that results in remote addresses [‘REMOTE_ADDR’] being captured as 0.0.0.0

Took me a while to search for the solution, however, in your Apache configuration (httpd.conf) file include the line - Win32DisableAcceptEx – makes all the problems go away. Doesn’t matter where you include this apparently, although I’ve not moved it around to see if there’s anywhere I can put it where it won’t work.

A big thank you to all of the software providers I’ve used. The list is as follows:

PHP used as a preprocessor for most pages. PHP allows you to script pages and images dynamically on the server before they are sent to the browser. For example, the page you are browsing now doesn’t really exist – it is created using PHP and served to you in XHTML format with some javascript thrown in.

MySQL is the database engine used to store data as needed. These blogs are stored in a MySQL database and fetched by PHP to be displayed in XHTML format.

Apache as mentioned previously is the webserver software. When you connect to this site, Apache sends you the page you are looking for.

Crimson Editor is the software used to write the code for the webpages whether they be in HTML, PHP or whatever.

hMailServer is the email server that I use for mail sent to eastbayrag.com.

ZoneEdit is the domain name registrar I use to direct all the www.eastbayrag.com traffic to my server.

Inadyn is the software used to update ZoneEdit with my IP address. I have a dynamic IP address so I need to keep my Domain Name Server (DNS) updated with my IP address if it changes so requests are correctly sent to my computer.

LogValidator from W3C. As mentioned above, this is used to test the appropriateness of coding against the standards.

Perl is another scripting language. This is required to use the LogValidator program from W3C. This looks really powerful and I look forward to using it more. At the minute I’m just using it to run the LogValidator.

TightVNC allows remote access to the server so I can perform maintenance or transfer files remotely.

With that list of software, I guess the question is “How does it work?” Well, lets start with what happens at your end. When you launch your browser, you point it towards a webpage, lets say www.eastbayrag.com. Your browser shoots a request off to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) that asks “where do I find www.eastbayrag.com” Your ISP answers with “I don’t know, but this server over at ZoneEdit does” so it trundles off to ZoneEdit to get the IP address. When it gets the IP address (which is kept updated with Inadyn software) it then points you to my server. The request comes into my server and is picked up by the Apache software. This figures out which page you want and gives it to you.

Now, from my end, I get to control what you get to see. Apache is configured to pick up index files if you request a directory and to perform different functions on different document types. Basically, .html files are just given to you, .shtml files are read and parsed for includes (e.g. the header and footer of most pages are the same and this is achieved through an include rather than repeating the same code over and over again on each page) and .php files are pre-processed with PHP.

PHP allows me to script items as we go along making it easier to maintain the website without creating thousands of pages. Some examples of this are as follows:

1) The photos pages display thumbnails of each image and allow you to double click to view a larger image. Each directory is created the same with a subdirectories of “small” and “big.” The PHP code looks in the small directory and displays all the images in the table format you see. It also embeds some javascript that allows the double click function.

2) The blog pages are sections stored in a MySQL database. PHP is used to retrieve the information and display it according to which blog you select. When you submit a comment, you make an entry that is picked up by PHP and put into the database so it can be retrieved later.

In its simplest form, the PHP script does something and then outputs it in another code (HTML/XHTML) that can be read by your browser. Hence the term pre-processor. So you use one language to write another language. Actually a little more complicated, HTML/XHTML can’t do anything it just displays stuff. Javascript is a language that exists on your browser that allows things to happen, so PHP is used to output to multiple languages that are read by your browser. The easiest example of this is the buttons at the top of this page. There is a little bit of javascript that basically says when you put your mouse over the top of the button to swap the image.

Simple really!!